Sony E Reader

I was given my Ereader as a birthday present as I am an avid and very fast reader, especially when I'm on holiday, so it seemed the perfect present to lighten my load when travelling.

However, I have since found that my Ereader is far more versatile and has been time, money and space saving in other areas of my life as well.

What I haven't seen mentioned by other reviewers, and please forgive me if I have missed this in someone else's review, but I have found the Ereader a fantastic way of storing PDF and other Document files. As a very mature student, teacher and support co-ordinator, I have been able to store lots of research items, saving on printing costs and being able to bookmark pages has been really useful. I also have just bought a Blackberry and have put its manual on my Ereader for easy reference, rather than just saving it on my laptop or printing its many pages. The Ereader is much lighter and smaller to carry than my Laptop.

My Ereader goes everywhere with me and has probably already saved me its retail value by not having to print or photocopy so many pages.

I also use it to listen to audio books or music when I am having trouble sleeping or am travelling alone and don't want to be disturbed by fellow travellers. You can listen to music while reading, which is excellent on a flight if your mobile doesn't have "Flight mode" and you do not have or want to carry a separate MP3 player.

I have would have liked more typeface size options but this is probably nitpicking. I was given a cover with integral light and both Ereader and Light have survived me dropping them when I have fallen asleep reading.

My husband is also happy as he is not disturbed by me having a bedside light on to read or the sound of turning pages.

I umm'd and ahh'd for ages before buying my e-reader but haven't regretted it for a minute.

It is easy to use (I hate the e library software that comes with it and most often just copy and paste books to my SD card/reader itself rather than use the software.) offering you several options to find the books you want including by date added (my fav option), by author (it does sort by first name which is a bit daft), by collections which you can customise to your favs and more. You can play music while you read on it (although you have to use earphones (not included.) It has a picture viewer for photos but the graphics aren't that good and I wouldn't bother using it for that.

You can change the font size of books which is helpful but can sometimes leave you with lots of words with hyphens in the middle where they were at the end of a line but now aren't (a small annoyance) changing font size does mean that when you initially open the book it will take longer to load and will run down your battery faster.

You get a USB cord to charge from your computer with it, this takes 4 hours and you can't read anything when you're charging it. You can buy a charger separately and I don't regret that I did, it charges in 2 hours and lets you read from mains power if you want.

If you're an avid reader you'll probably find like me that you fill your readers memory very fast but you can have either/both an SD card and Sony memory stick to hold extra books.

There aren't tons of places to get ebooks in the UK yet and I have struggled to get a couple I want but more and more places are coming on board including waterstones, whsmiths and I buy from some American websites like booksonboard too. I love the instance-y of buying ebooks and not having to travel into town only to find they didn't have it anyway.

It comes with 100 classic books on a disc, I put about 7 of them on my reader but haven't actually bothered to read any of them, they're all really old classics which probably won't appeal unless you like classical literature.

I absolutely love my ereader and wouldn't be without it now but I probably wouldn't recommend it unless you're an avid reader like me and at least partially computer literate, there is still a way to go until these are the norm.

I bought the product originally to download and read books but having just taken it on holiday loaded up with PDF nursing strategies to prepare for an interview i was delighted as this meant i could use my holiday time effectively and not go overweight with my luggage - excellent all round, easy to read in sunlight on the beach and of course very compact in my hand luggage.