First of all I asked Cliff, a friend who runs the local pub-hotel, a keen reader, but no geek (he only discovered the iPod this year). Cliff ran his fingers over the Sony and declared, first of all, that he liked the look and feel of it. I showed him the controls and he had the knack of picking a book and moving backwards and forwards very quickly. Then I let him browse through the collection of works on the thing.

His eyes opened wide.

‘You get all this stuff?’

‘Yes. The free stuff is out of copyright which means that…’

‘You get all this stuff!’

God bless the public. They know nothing about copyright, do they? All Cliff saw was a vast collection of old books he hadn’t read in ages, a few he’d always meant to read, and the possibility of going on his cruise in February with a complete library stored in something that will fit into the side pocket of a briefcase. ‘Sold’ did not describe Cliff’s response to the Sony. He was absolutely in love with the thing and checking out its availability online in a flash. This I found deeply interesting because here was someone who is not naturally keen on electronica at all.

My next guinea pig was my daughter, Kate. She graduated from UCL with a first in English earlier this year and is an utter bookaholic. Again, she is not a natural for this thing. She likes writing in longhand, loves pen and paper, and actually buys CDs because she prefers the sound to the thin, compressed audio you get with iTunes.

Kate has done some work experience in publishing and is looking for a job as an editorial assistant somewhere (all vacancies to me at davidhewson.com please). So she has a couple of different perspectives on the thing – as a reader and someone who’s seen inside the publishing industry. The reader in her was impressed too. She found the screen and the type excellent, and the device very simple to use. Like everyone she was taken aback by the sheer volume of material it can hold. And she liked it as a piece of equipment too – it felt good to hold and didn’t scream ‘geek’.

Her work experience had given her some insight into handling manuscripts, though, and here the demands are a bit different. Like me, she would have liked some way to make notes or at least name bookmarks in a manuscript, or perhaps even edit text in some way. But that, I guess, is not what the Sony is for. This is an ebook, nothing more, nothing less. If you want email, web access, store browsing and a lot of fancy features you will have to wait for something else.

Will this dent the Sony’s sales? I doubt it somehow. This clever little thing hits most of the buttons it seeks to press as a simple, convenient and very powerful means of carrying your own library along with you. It was a real pleasure to use. The battery life is simply amazing. And I’m sure the next version will be even better – though this one will, I think, do good service for years.

One thing did become clear when I spoke to other people about ebooks though. They are seen as a supplement to the printed word, not a replacement for it. Both Cliff and Kate said very emphatically that they would not stop buying real books if they had a Sony. A simple electronic device, however clever, was no substitute for the physical medium of ink and paper. If something was really precious to you, then both felt that they would go to a book store and buy the ‘real thing’, if you can call it that.

As a mere author, you’ve no idea how reassuring I found that. Ebooks, it seems, are not what iTunes was to the CD market. They’re a new source of sales, not some digital newcomer that will sweep away everything that went before. Well, not for a while anyway.

I promised to take a look at Sony’s digital book on the road, since that is probably where many people would expect to use it. Imagine packing for your holiday and storing hundreds of books on a single little electronic device. True it is electronic, but no more fragile than a camera. And it would read beautifully on a beach.

It was not beach weather when I turned up at Kings Cross for my events in South Shields and Edinburgh where, very soon, I discovered what a different world we inhabit when things go digital. I happen to go under the fancy title of international director of the authors’ organisation International Thrillerwriters Inc. We have a growing band of members outside the US where ITW began, and some of the most enthusiastic are in South Africa. A band of them, under the editorship of Joanna Hitchen, have a short story collection coming out next year under the title Bad Company, published by Pan Macmillan South Africa. I promised to ask Lee Child, until recently an ITW member too, if he’d write the foreword (knowing Lee, one of the most generous bestsellers around, I didn’t think this would be difficult).

At Kings Cross I got the message that the collection was finished, ready to be read and enclosed as a pdf attachment. It downloaded onto my Nokia in under a minute using 3’s trusty mobile broadband and, before we were out of London, I’d transferred it to the Sony reader and was able to start reading the first typeset proof, finished in Johannesburg, edited in Cape Town, immediately. Excellent it is too. But could you imagine that a few years ago? Transferring an entire book across continents and then reading it, on what looks very like a real book, all while sitting on a train?

Bad Company is a professionally typeset book and, like most of those sold for the reader, looks pretty much on screen as it will on the page. Unfortunately you can’t expect that kind of publication quality with everything you can put on the reader. Some of the out of copyright classics Sony supply for free seem to be formatted more for computers than ebooks, in that they have extra line spaces between the paragraphs. This can be quite distracting. The reader’s screen is a touch short in any case, and wasted blank lines do get in the way of fluent reading.

I also took with me two versions of my current first draft of the ninth Nic Costa book, some 25,000 words, one in pdf format, one in rich text (the reader can handle both). The rtf worked fine and was as readable as an ebook, though if you switch between the three text sizes the reader does take a little while to process the rerendering of the text. The pdf was much more problematic. I use a Mac which will produce pdfs at the drop of a hat – as easily as printing. They look fine on my Mac, and on a PC too. But the Sony doesn’t like them at all, and they were dogged in particular by soft line breaks turning into hard ones, rendering the text unreadable. (Update: this can be fixed – see end of story). 

If, like me, you are an old book addict this is a bit of a problem. I use a wonderful piece of software called Voluminous which can track down out of copyright ebooks from sources such as Project Gutenberg and turn them into a readable format through a simple search interface. It would have been wonderful if I could have just hit ‘print to pdf’ and sent them to the Sony, but this wasn’t to be without faffing around with rtf and deciding fonts and font sizes.

Searching the web for a solution I discovered I wasn’t alone in noticing this apparent glitch in the Sony’s software. Is it a big deal? Probably not, since you can use rtf instead. Also it’s important to point out this is a machine aimed at normal human beings, not authors and publishers. It is simply a reader, not an editing console. You can’t write notes in the margin, search for text, or do anything to a manuscript beyond insert simple unidentified bookmarks. Readers probably won’t miss a thing, but as an author I would look for those facilities in a manuscript handling device – which this is only up to a point.

But these are professional quibbles which will not bother the mass market. The honest truth is the Sony behaved impeccably throughout my trip. The battery life is astonishing (partly because it doesn’t have fancy features such as wireless internet and a keyboard). The readability is excellent under a variety of conditions. I couldn’t help noticing the passenger in the next seat sneaking a look at it on the way north. And that brings me to the next and final article in this brief series. Let’s show Sony’s invention to a few potential everyday customers and see what they think.

But first an event at Edinburgh’s beautiful Central Library – where I might just show it off out of interest too.

*Thanks to the comment below I am happy to retract my statement that Mac pdfs don’t work on the Sony. It’s all a question of formatting and getting the page size right. Which isn’t easy by the way – some help for Mac users from Sony would be appreciated.

Back in the mists of time when I wrote about technology for the Sunday Times I once asked Bill Gates about ebooks. It was at a press event in a house in Gramercy Park New York, circa 1995 when the Microsofties were trying to prove to the world that they were family-friendly by launching a bunch of products, some successful, some disastrous, aimed at the home, not the office.

Mr Gates (who had allegedly somewhat ruined the atmosphere by referring to children in one interview as ‘basic subsets of the family entity’) was, for once, up for any question I could think of. So I wondered if he thought we would all be abandoning paper to read books and newspapers on screen before long, fully expecting a technophiliac answer predicting the death of print everywhere.

‘No,’ he said, confounding all expectations. ‘We don’t have the technology and we don’t have the need, not for a long time.’

Is thirteen years long enough? On my desk now is Sony’s newly-released PRS-505 ‘portable reader system’, available at Waterstones and a variety of other outfits – if you can find one in stock – for £199. These things have been thrust at journalist, publishers and lucky readers for a little while. But Sony very kindly thought they would shove one at an author too to see what one of us thinks, and I am the lucky scribe.

I’ll be taking it on the road for some promotional events up north this week, and showing it around to people I know to get their opinions too. So look for a couple more posts when I am more familiar with the beast. But first impressions count – as do first prejudices.

To be honest I’ve always felt a little sympathy with Mr Gates’ initial view. I spent a lot of my time staring at computer screens. All of my books are written using a very nifty piece of software specially aimed at authors, Scrivener. Even so I will print out drafts of the manuscript repeatedly and read them with a pen in hand because, let’s say it out loud, reading on screen just isn’t the same.

At least not on a conventional flat screen, which the Sony very much does not have. I won’t bore you with the technology but it is nothing like the flat screen in your TV or computer monitor. This is a kind of electronic ink. A tedious fact in itself were it not for two things: it actually looks very good indeed, sharp and very much like real text. And it has no backlight so the Sony uses no power whatsoever when you are simply reading a page – only when you ‘turn’ to a new one.

How close to paper is it? Very close, particularly in bright daylight (when most electronic screens are utterly readable). The background isn’t as white a you’d expect, and you can’t see much in dark situations where a laptop would be very readable. But it’s a lot better than I expected, and I was quite happy flicking through books very quickly with it indeed.

So there’s the first lesson I learned about the Sony. You need to see it to believe it. Prejudices, for or again, really don’t count for much because this is quite unlike anything else you’ve ever encountered before.

Here’s the second big surprise: the size and feel of the thing. It’s tiny, little bigger than a paperback book, beautifully made, with a sturdy and expensive-looking satin metal shell encased in a cover that feels very like brown leather (which it isn’t). I’ve seen other book readers and they all, let’s be frank, look like calculators that have spent too long in McDonalds. The Sony isn’t plasticky, doesn’t shout ‘geek’ and feels very, very nice in the hand. It’s also, perhaps deliberately, under-featured compared to something like Amazon’s Kindle (which isn’t available in the UK and won’t be for some time). The Kindle has a keyboard, wireless internet and a lot of possibilities.

The PRS-505 is pretty much an ebook reader plain and simple. You can load mp3 files on it (using an external memory card since the built-in memory is aimed at book storage, not music). You can even load your favourite photos and look at them in black and white, though quite why I don’t know. But this is about reading books really, and I rather like that idea. You don’t get distracted by thinking, ‘Let’s just check the email’. It’s also dead easy to use – with buttons for moving forward and backwards in a book, a bookmark button that ‘turns’ the corner of the page to store a location, and some other buttons on the side that let you browse your library (and, a little tip, allow you to go to a page number if you type them in).

The thing comes with a hundred free out of copyright classics such as Moby Dick, Pride and Prejudice, and Dracula. You buy ebooks online from the Waterstones site, download them to your computer, then transfer them to the reader via a simple USB cable. There’s special software to automate this on Windows, though you have to do it manually if you’re a Mac user like me – which isn’t hard. You can also load pdf and Word files on it too.

So first impressions are good, better, to be honest, than I expected. I shall be climbing on board the train to Newcastle with more than a hundred books on this thing, including one of my own, and the first 25,000 words of the book I’m writing now (which you lot won’t see till 2010). Supposedly I can turn 6,800 pages before needing a recharge which ought to set me up for a four-day trip I’d hope.

Next week some time I’ll tell you what it feels like after a couple of days.

You can download the ebook from Scribd

Since yesterday it’s been downloaded over 3000 times. The ebook will cease to be available as a free download after October 15th, 2008. Kudos to David and good luck to him!