NO MATTER how good some gadgets look on the drawing board, you will never actually use them. This has, without fail, been the case with electronic books — no version has felt like something you would want to use to read a novel.

The Sony Reader, though, stands out from its clunky predecessors. It is about the right size and weight to be properly portable. It would fit in a jacket pocket or a handbag easily.

It even looks like something you would want to carry. The casing — in contrast with the white plastic of the Sony Librie — is metallic and dark. Panasonic’s Sigma experimented with a double screen, but it made the unit far too bulky.

Sony has tried to make the Reader as low-tech as possible. There are slots for memory sticks and cables, but the basic controls are limited to only two buttons and it has an easy menu to navigate.

Because each virtual page of the display contains slightly fewer words than a normal page, the speed of each “turn” must be fast or the flow of reading is broken too easily. A turn that took a second made an earlier version unusable.

The half-second that it now takes to update a page feels about right. The first three pages of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code took only a second or so longer to read than using the paperback version.

The “killer application” of the Reader is probably more on the software side. The latest device has none of the restrictions that dragged down earlier versions. It is more open in what files it will handle and can store indefinitely about 100 books on a £30 memory chip.

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