Sony Reader PRS-650 Touch Edition review

Book support is getting a lot better, with a wide range of titles available from stores including Waterstones, Coolerbooks, WH Smiths and the new Kobo Books. Typically, books are a little more expensive than those in the Amazon Kindle Store and you may have to hunt around to find the book you want, as not every store carries the same range.

One new feature is the support for library books. Using this you can ‘rent’ a book for a set period of time from your local library, after which they’re deleted from your device. There are currently 50 and you can find them on the Sony Reader website. There are a few restrictions to the service: you have to be a member of the library in question and each library only has a set number of each title for rent. When the rentals hits that number you can’t borrow a book.

We’re rather taken with the PRS-650. It’s incredibly smooth to use and works brilliantly with all forms of documents. The wide range of formats it supports means that you can choose what you want to put on it. It’s a little expensive, though, and the number and prices of books available can’t match those on the Amazon Kindle store. For the latest books and pure simplicity, the cheaper Kindle is a better choice for most people, but if you want to choose what you want to read and from where, and look at a lot of PDFs, the PRS-650 is a great choice.