Let's talk about e-readers. I've been reading e-books for
years now. The main advantages for me are:a) I do not have room any more for physical
books, so rather than having to store favourite books in boxes
in the attic I'd rather have them where I can get to them
easily.
b) As I prefer to read books in English, in the past this meant
I had to go to specialized book stores. With Amazon etc. I could
finally order books easily through the Internet, but that meant
having to wait for the book to arrive. Now I can buy and read my
books instantly.
c) As e-books are not huge byte-wise, you can lug around quite a
lot of books so you can decide what to read on the fly so to
speak.
Until a few months ago I read my books only on my PDA (even
for a time on my PDA phone, but the screen was really too small
to read for any length of time. I also used a (borrowed) I-Touch
to read, but I found flicking the pages with my fingers, though
seemingly natural, very tedious (but I have high hopes for
version 2 of the I-Pad which hopefully does have a camera etc). Although the screen of my
PDA is smaller than on most e-readers, the clear type text is
very readable. Reading is comfortable, I just have to use
my thumb to go to the next page (it is a lot easier to handle
than a book, especially in bed, I now even prefer reading e-books
because of this). As it is a PDA I can have several different
software e-readers on the same device so that it really does not
matter which format they come in. Reading at night is great as
the screen is back lit so you do not need an extra light. If I
do not feel like reading I can do anything I want (like watching Youtube). The only two disadvantages for me are that you
have to recharge your batteries regularly and that you cannot
read in full sunlight (both of which are surmountable).
Since its release in Europe I have a Kindle (Amazon). It has
a nice screen and reading is fine. Buying the books from the
store using the Kindle is not entirely effortless, but only
because it is not easy to browse or search for the book you are
looking for. But as the Kindle has its own wireless you can buy
new books (or magazines, newspapers) on the spot, wherever you
are. Which is quite an attractive option. At home I use a normal
computer to shop at Amazon, when I've bought the particular book I'm
looking for, as soon as I turn on my Kindle (and the wireless)
the book is delivered instantly. The main advantages of the
Kindle are its wireless delivery of books etc. (via their own
global wireless network, so you do not have to do anything or
have access to another wireless network), the fact that you can
look up things in Wikipedia and do simple Google searches. The
main disadvantage (but this goes for all regular e-readers) is
that you need an external light source. So in bed you have to
turn on the light or use a little battery operated reading lamp
(I bought one with the Kindle but it practically eats
batteries). Another disadvantage happens when you accumulate a
lot of books. You have to browse through quite a lot of pages to
get to your book. On the other hand the book that you are
reading at the moment is always the first in the list.
After I
had bought the Kindle and experimented with it, I also bought an
Foxit eSlick reader. My two main reasons were: a) I already
owned a lot of pdb e-books and I did not want to convert them
all to a Kindle format and b) the eSlick is the only e-reader
that I know of that can reflow pdf files to make them easily
readable on the e-reader. Now that I've been using it I must say
that the latter is the major advantage. Although not all pdf-files
reflow to seamless new pages, the result is always very readable
text (even with pictures). The other advantage the eSlick has,
is that the screen is marginally larger than that of the Kindle,
but more importantly it is lighter and easier to handle. Another
advantage over the Kindle is that the eSlick can handle
subdirectories so that finding the correct book in a large
collection is a lot easier provided that you make a nice
subdirectory tree (but as you can use external memory cards
that's no problem at all). I've just been reading books using
Microsoft's e-reader on my pda and because of the time it takes
to even read in all the books, not to mention having to page
through some 38 pages to find a new book I fancy reading, meant
that I just did not switch the e-reader program off, because I
did not have the patience to wait for my reading list to finally
appear. Using the eSlick after that experience is refreshing to
say the least. The eSlick for the rest is a simple device. It
does not have a wireless so you buy the books using a regular
computer and then transfer the files through usb or by copying
them into your neat directory tree.
Do I have a final verdict.
Well they all have their advantages. As I'm more of a night time
reader I still prefer my PDA. But with summer coming (I'm also a
public transport reader) I guess I will eventually switch more
to one of the other two. The eSlick for pdf-files and books that
I already own and the Kindle for new books. Why? Because some
idiot has decided that most of the books I want to read may not
be bought from outside the USA and Canada. So all the advantages
I used to have reading on my PDA are now gone if it were not for
the Kindle. Because there it does not matter that I'm in Europa.
The only thing that counts is the Kindle format. I'm usually
against special formats but now I'm really grateful because
English books are all I read.
