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I’ve been reading Salman Rushdie‘s Fury on my new Sony Portable Reader, and I already read a Van Von Hunter Manga title on the Reader. If you haven’t read Fury yet, and you’re a Rushdie fan, I recommend it. I’m only halfway through so far, but it is replete with pop-culture and literary references. Good writing. An interesting story. Van Von Hunter is silly Manga fun.

This is the first electronic device that I’ve ever read text on that actually feels like a book and acts more or less like paper in different lighting conditions. So far, I haven’t seen the battery indicator on the device dip in the least. Reading books designed for the Reader (like those I purchased off of the Sony Connect store) is great, as you can adjust the text size to your liking (small, medium, or large) and everything is formatted nicely with easy to follow pagination at the bottom of the screen. You can even add your own bookmarks on the fly that turn down a little virtual page ear in the top right corner. It reads text and rich text format files easily as well. PDFs work, but unfortunately not quite as smoothly as RTF files; if you’re printing things to PDF, make sure you bold or up the size of the font before putting it on the Reader. I currently have 63 “books” loaded on the device with plenty of room to spare on the 2GB SD Card I have been using for transferring most of the files. There isn’t a Mac solution yet (that I’ve found) for connecting directly to the Reader with a Mac, but the software that came with it runs perfectly fine in Parallels and you can always copy files directly to either an SD card or a Memory Stick.

It can be used as a rudimentary MP3 player / digital audio book player as well, but I haven’t used this feature yet, as I already have an iPod and I’m sure the audio playback eats through the battery.

Basically, so far, I love this thing. It’s my dream book, as it can carry all of my books, if I can find them in a digital format. E-paper is amazing. The refresh when you “turn pages” that some people have complained about doesn’t bother me at all. Project Gutenberg has been great for finding books, and I can only hope that more and more book publishers start using the Sony Connect store to publish ebooks of their texts. Here’s one consumer that will buy them if you will. The device feels very solid and the pseudo-leather cover gives it a nice book feel. I could see this device becoming the iPod for books amongst a certain percentage of the population, but I think the price is going to have to come down a bit for it to really take off.

Here are three things needed for the Sony Portable Reader to succeed nicely:

1. A Mac solution for managing the Reader and connecting to the Connect store. Considering all the PSP Mac solutions that came out and were selling for $15-35 after the PSP launched without Mac support, I think this is a market to be filled by enterprising coders out there on the web. Get to it and let me know when you’ve succeeded. I’ll buy your product!

2. A solution on both Mac and PC for converting text files easily into native Reader format. Ideally, this solution will be able to subscribe to RSS feeds and easily convert online writing to Reader format with some sort of easy sync function.

3. A solar-paneled variant of the cover that can be used to charge the Reader via USB. Given such a peripheral, the Reader would be the ideal book to crash on a deserted island with. Considering how little power the Reader consumes, it’s ideal for solar power and I’m surprised Sony didn’t already build this peripheral. Fortunately, this is one that I think I’ll be able to hack together myself with a little bit of work. Stay tuned…

Things I miss when reading on the Reader: I cannot flip quickly ahead to see how many pages remain in a given chapter. I cannot make notes in the margin.