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).
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