e-books

[72nova]

Can anyone give some info on these. I am thinking of getting one for my wife. I have been looking at the amazon kindle, sony, etc. Also can you download books from your local library to these? Thank you for any info.

[absintheisfun]

My wife really, really wanted one as well, and when we went to pull the trigger she changed her mind--said that she liked having the physical book too much. Of the bunch, the Kindle seemed to be the best and had the most software (books) for it.

[Mathius]

Kindle is the most popular. There are a lot of other ones out there, but the ones I read about didn't get great reviews. There are online reviews if you do a google search.

The big thing is lighting. If you want someone to be able to read it like a book, they need to be able to see the screen well. A lot of these things are hard to see in direct sunlight. I would also think that battery life is a big deal. I don't have a lot of faith in lithium technology, but we're stuck with it. It seems like it's all hit or miss. With cell phones or power tools, it doesn't matter. You either get a good battery or you don't. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it.

I don't know if I could sit there and read a book on a screen. I have literally hundreds of ebooks on my pc and I can count on one hand the number of them I actually STARTED to read online. But if I had portability, maybe that would change. Something to do at the doctor's office, waiting for an oil change, etc.

Whatever you get her, make sure it can read .pdf files, because there's a whole world of free ebooks out there in pdf form, and I don't just mean the kind of stuff you have to find on file sharing sites that's technically illegal. There are a lot of classics that are more or less considered public domain and a lot of well known authors have allowed their work to be free in ebook form and you can download them from normal day to day web sites.

Heres an example: http://www.planetebook.com/free-ebooks.asp

I'm a big reader, but there's a lot of classic novels available on that site that I know the story because they're so popular, but I've never read the originals.

Mathius

[rob07002]

My wife loves her iPad. You can download from both Amazon and iBook Store, run all iPad apps and most iPhone apps as well. battery life is amazing. Full charge will most def last over 11-12 hours of continuous reading. Nice big and brilliant screen for movies as well. 16Gig version w/o 3g is $499 I think. She has the 32g version which should store literraly over 1000 books.

[wmhjr]

I got my wife a Kindle last christmas. She likes it and uses it quite a bit. I'd say the jury is still out in terms of just how much. I looked at the Sony reader, and liked the backlighting - but the wireless wasn't available at that time. The kindle is very light and durable, but it requires some light to read it by. Were the iPad available, that would definitely have been an option at the time. The screen is great - though it's much larger and heavier as well as not as rugged as the Kindle. Look carefully at the different services that each device and their support offers. There are more differences than you first expect.

[critter]

IPad here. If you want total media consumption it can't be beat. For just books, the Kindle price point can't be beat.

[Mathius]

Another thing I thought of after re-reading my post and others is that it needs to have one of two things... either good interface between the product and your home pc, or a good smart phone level internet interface for the device itself.

You need to have some way of getting the aforementioned ebooks onto the thing, preferably without being charged an arm and a leg extra.

I would be very disappointed if I bought one of these things and I couldn't use the hundreds of ebooks I already had on my PC, or if I was limited to only getting books from the mfr's service. Or paying a monthly fee, or any of these things.

I know public libraries are starting to get into offering ebooks as well. You don't want to be paying an arm and a leg to get them on your machine.

Mathius