Choosing which books to take with you on your travels or worrying about whether you have packed sufficient reading material to last the trip, is yesterday’s problem. From today, with the new Reader from Sony you can download a small library to take with you wherever you go, so you will never be short of a good read.

The Sony Reader is the size of a small paperback, but has the capacity to store 160 electronic books (eBooks) and is simple to use. Having bought a Reader and installed the supplied software, you can create and manage a library on your PC and transfer eBook files to the Reader using the USB cable provided in much the same way as transferring music onto an MP3 player.

The slim and stylish aluminium Reader houses a high-resolution (170 pixels per inch) six-inch screen, which utilises eInk technology to create an easy to read image that resembles traditional ink on paper.

As the screen is not backlit, there is no flickering and reading outside on sunny days is easy on the eyes. The very low power consumption allows almost 7000 page turns from a single charge, so you will have more than enough time to peruse a good few of the 100 classic tomes that come free with Reader.

The intuitive design makes using Reader straightforward. The menu system lets you browse your library by author, title or date to find what you want quickly and efficiently. The magnifying function allows you to set a comfortable text size and the bookmarking button means that you never lose your page on any of the books you are reading.

Although equipped with everything the avid reader needs to get going, Sony has produced a range of useful accessories for those who wish to personalise or enhance the performance of their Reader.

The standard durable soft cover can be replaced with a stylish leather cover, a rugged clear silicon one, or even a cover that incorporates a lamp to allow reading in dark or low light conditions. A separate clip-on flexible lamp is also available.

For those who feel that a mobile library of 160 books may not be enough, the built-in MemoryStick DUO and SD Card slots can be used to increase the Reader’s capacity to around 13,000 titles. In addition, if for any reason you are unable to access a PC or laptop to charge your Reader via the supplied USB cable, a separate quick-charge mains adapter is available and comes with both UK 3-pin and standard continental 2-pin plug leads, so you can keep reading wherever you find yourself.

For the launch of Reader, Sony have chosen to team up with high street bookshop chain, Waterstone's.

Having bought your Reader you’ll have access to Waterstone’s vast catalogue of eBooks. From launch, tens of thousands of eBook titles will be available to buy and download directly from their secure and simple online store, with thousands more added each month and new titles becoming available on a weekly basis. www.waterstones.com/ebooks

If that’s not enough, you can also use Reader to store personal documents in Word, PDF, rtf and txt formats, jpeg, gif and png images, and music and podcast files which can be listened to via the headphone socket, even as you read.

For more information visit www.sony.co.uk/hub/reader-ebook

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