The Sony Reader is now in Exeter

The Sony Reader is now in Exeter. Both branches of Waterstones have a display. I did a quick report on the "wifi Exeter" blog and a story for OhmyNews.

It turns out that when Sony say it supports Word what they mean is that it supports RTF (rich text files). Actually you need a local copy of Word to make the switch. Saving as RTF in Open Office works just as well, just drag and drop into the Sony Reader. So this is "good enough" for the moment. Understanding the creation of an ePub can wait a while.

I have found out a bit more through the Teleread blog.

A commint from Mike Cane links to this tutorial. For some people this could be clarity enough.

I have also found more from Adobe. A blog connects to a ePub check so this great once you get started.

There is a Digital Publishing Technology Centre written for developers. The guidance on what you actually do the get an ePub from Indesign is a link to another blog. I may have shown this link before. it is the point where I get stuck.

Meanwhile Adobe have announced an announcement about CS4 and some detail about online Photoshop from a phone. However there is no release yet for a MARS plug-in for Acrobat 9, predicted on the MARS blog for early August.

So perhaps the idea of an "XML friendly" version of PDF has been forgotten and ePUB is the suggestion for text reflow on small screens. This impression comes over through various blogs but I think there could be some clarity from Adobe with a bit more of a profile. So far as I know there has been no statement from Adobe UK around the Waterstones launch for the Sony Reader. Adobe Digital Editions is rarely explained.