Re: How to Buy an Ebook Reader
The transition to digital books is happening faster than anyone expected. After years of false starts—think Stephen King's novella Riding the Bullet, released way back in 2000—ebook readers have soared in popularity over the past few years. Amazon's release of the first Kindle in 2007 was a turning point; now people are buying and downloading digital books at a breakneck pace.
Even better: Prices have dropped considerably across the board, to the point where mainstream casual readers can get a quality ebook reader for a lot less than $100. It's no longer an early adopter's game. As a result, you have more choice than ever. But before you settle on a single device, you have some decisions to make. Here's what you should consider when shopping for an ebook reader:
What Screen Type and How Big?
Basic ebook readers use monochrome, E Ink screens to display text. E Ink looks a lot like paper, and it's easy on your eyes when reading for hours and hours. On the least expensive models, it's not backlit, so you'll need light to see the text, just as you would with a printed book. More expensive ebook readers now include edge lighting that lets you see in the dark, like the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite, the Barnes & Noble Nook Simple Touch With GlowLight, and the Kobo Glo. With each model, you can vary the intensity of the brightness from barely-there to flashlight-bright. On the lowest settings, you can read in the dark while your significant other sleeps peacefully next to you.
In all cases, E Ink is much easier to read in bright sunlight, while color touch screens on tablets, like the Amazon Kindle Fire HD tend to wash out, and their glossy displays can show distracting reflections.
The industry seems to have settled on six inches as the optimal display size for E Ink readers; this is what you'll find on the current-gen, entry-level Amazon Kindle and the Barnes & Noble Nook Simple Touch, for example. There are exceptions, though: Kobo just released the Mini, which features a 5-inch screen.
Manufacturers are also improving the quality of these E Ink displays. A few years ago, page refreshes were sluggish, the entire screen flashed black with each page turn, and some early ebook readers had problems with text contrast, which made for difficult reading. That's all history. The latest Kindles and Nooks have crisp, clear text, and both employ caching schemes that only do full page refreshes every six pages or so; the rest of the time, only the letters fade out and back in again. The page refreshes themselves are also quite fast.
Meanwhile, touch screens have an innate advantage: On-screen keyboards make it easy to take notes or run searches within the text of your books. As ebook readers with hardware QWERTY keyboards have all but disappeared, this is an important distinction for power users. Also, maneuvering a massive online book store on a device with a touch screen is a lot easier.
So E Ink is great for reading books, but color tablet touch screens offer a bevy of other benefits. Their color screens mean you can read much more than books: magazines and comic books are just two examples. Best of all, even low-cost tablets like the base Amazon Kindle Fire and the Barnes & Noble Nook HD can browse the Web, stream video from Netflix, Hulu or other sources, play music, and run Android apps. If you have more cash, the Apple iPad mini is more of a multi-faceted device, with its 7.9-inch screen, bevy of apps, and surprisingly light weight.
What Kind of Wireless Connection Do You Need?
Amazon's original Kindle integrated an always-on cellular radio that let you buy and download books from anywhere, over the air, for free (aside from the cost of the book itself, of course). Most devices now offer Wi-Fi as the base level wireless connection—at a much lower cost—with 3G cellular data either as part of a more-expensive version (such as with the Kindle), or not available at all (as with Sony's Reader models).
As long as you don't mind waiting until you're at home or a hotspot to shop for new books, Wi-Fi should work for you. A select few may still prefer to pony up for 3G to buy a new book while, say, on a long train trip, or lounging at the beach. Devices without any wireless connection at all have essentially disappeared. Some ebook readers like the Nook Simple Touch come with memory card slots, so you can sideload digital books or PDFs in addition to buying or downloading media wirelessly.
While we're on the subject, internal storage capacity is no longer a concern. Most every ebook reader you can buy today can store more than 1,000 books, with some offering room for upwards of 3,000. And if you have more books than that, each of the major vendors offers cloud storage, letting you download books to your device whenever you need them, assuming you're in a Wi-Fi hotspot (or anywhere you have a cell signal, if you have a 3G-capable model).
e - Book Reader Review
Why Get an e - Book Reader?
So why should you buy an e - Book reader? Convenience. Instead of going to a bookstore to make a purchase or ordering a book online and waiting for it to arrive, you can purchase and download an e - Book anytime, from any location with a Wi-Fi connection. Several classic books are free to download because their copyrights have expired, and when you don’t have to pay for printing, you don’t have to pay.
Want more than one book? That’s fine. The memory of e - Book readers is large enough to hold several hundred books. e - Book readers are the only way to carry countless books with you wherever you go, and keep the weight under a pound.
You want more convenience? e - Book readers make it easy to save your place, take notes, clip and save favorite quotations, and highlight passages you want to find again. e - Book readers are designed for readability and to make your reading experience as enjoyable as possible. Find out if a reader such as the top-ranked Kindle Fire HD, Kindle 3G, or Nook Simple Touch Reader is right for you as we give you some of the reasons for switching to digital.
e - Book Readers: What to Look For
With the variety of eBook readers available, you really get the opportunity to pick and choose the features and design that fit you best. Here are the factors that we took into consideration when ranking and comparing e - Book readers.Some e - Book readers offer E-Ink technology that makes you feel more like you are reading an actual book, while others offer LCD color screens that make images and movies come to life. Some offer button navigation and some have touchscreen navigation. Which is better for you? Does screen size matter? Do you want to know how much they each weigh? While some design aspects will depend on the user (E-Ink vs. LCD), we were able to find the e - Readers with the best resolution, the easiest navigation and the most impressive build.
Some e - Readers have hundreds of thousands of titles available from a dedicated service, while others can support a few files found on the internet. We rated the amount of content available for the device and how many different files each device can support. Obviously, the more file types the better, because that gives you more reading options.
The battery life of your e - Reader is crucial. Nobody wants their reading devices to run out of power before the climax of their novels. The number of pages that you can turn on a single charge and the amount of memory available for storing books are important for making the e - Reader experience more enjoyable.
There is always room for extra features to enjoy while reading a book. Some of these include the number of grayscale levels, audio formats, image formats, text-to-speech feature, apps, email, internet surfing and so much more.