The Sony 505 has 200 MB of internal storage. Sony says that is enough to hold about 160 e-books. If you want to store more, you can easily put thousands of books on memory cards. As shown in Figure 4, the Sony Reader has two memory card slots on the top of the device just to the right of the on/off switch.  It can accommodate an SD and/or Sony’s Memory Stick Pro.

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Figure 4: The top of the Sony Reader.

The bottom of the Sony 505, as shown in Figure 5,  has, from left to right,  a port for a strap, the  USB port that is used to connect the device to the computer, a DC-in port in case you want to purchase the optional AC adapter, a  a headphone jack, and a volume control.

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 Figure 5: The bottom of the Sony Reader.

The Sony Reader plays music, but you have to listen with headphones since there is no built-in speaker. It supports AAC and MP3 files.  The music isn’t easy to access. Since the device doesn’t have playlists or albums, all the music you put on the device winds up in one long list. Playing music drains the battery quickly, so while you can listen to music while reading, it is obvious that audio on this device was not intended as a primary feature.

Although you may be able to listen to some audio books, there is no built-in support for the popular Audible audio books. Other audio books are on a hit or miss basis. Even if you do find one that works, you will not have the pause and restart capabilities that you have on iPods and most other digital music devices.

Pictures can easily be put on the device by dragging and dropping through the software interface. As shown in Figure 6, the eight shade of grayscale produces a nice quality black-and-white photo display. There is also a slideshow option.

 
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Figure 6: A picture on the Sony Reader.