E-Readers

[Jaevric]

Wanted to find out if anyone here had experience with the various e-readers out there -- the Nook, Kindle, etc. I'm seriously considering getting one in the near future but will be doing some research first.

I'm not interested in something like an iPad that has a monthly fee to use. I don't really care if it plays movies or TV shows. I mostly just want it for books. I'm interested in ease of use and a clear, legible screen.

Also, for those of you with e-readers, have you found that most of the books you want to read are available for purchase and download?

[weemadando]

I use Aldiko on an Android phone. Nice interface and a massive catalogue of free books and no fees.

It has the usual non-eInk strain issues, but for commute/lunchtime reading it's fine.

[General Zod]

I wouldn't have suggested it a few years ago but lately the Kindle has dropped to a very reasonable price point. Right now I'd say it's the e-reader to get, but the rights management foibles might be a turnoff. They can pull any book from their store (and consequently your device) without any warning at all.

[Todeswind]

I actually own a Kindle DX, it's expensive enough that I can see how it would be a barrier against buying it but honestly I love it. I don't live in the US anymore so being able to buy new books through the Kindle 3-G is a godsend.

There are a couple of functions on it that I don't use, I'm not sure what the point of the speech function was if they're not going to bother to program the actual phonetic pronunciations for each book in a voice that doesn't hurt to listen to. But that's really a small issue for something that is ostensibly an e-book platform.

If I could only figure out a way to tether the 3G off it onto my computer it would be perfect.

[The Grim Squeaker]

I Have a third generation Kindle (no 3g), and I absolutely love it (with caveats).
It's very convenient, especially if you travel a lot, saves weight and space and it's very fun for reading.

The screen is great.

[loomer]

The travel cases look nice, but the damn things are pretty pricey.

What were those caveats, Grim? I was thinking of picking up a basic wi-fi K3 myself.

[Darth Tanner]

I was thinking of picking up a basic wi-fi K3 myself.

I would suggest getting the 3G one just for emergency internet access or in power cuts or just free on the move internet. For the small fixed price at purchase it’s a real bargain unless you already subscribe to some other mobile internet scheme.

The travel cases look nice, but the damn things are pretty pricey.

I do feel really guilty about spending so much on the leather case with an integrated light but you really can tell with the level of quality so I would recommend spending more money to get a good one.

They can pull any book from their store (and consequently your device) without any warning at all

Although they obviously retain their technical capacity to do this they have agreed not to do this in future. Also you don’t have to get all your books from the Kindle store and they have no control over those files.

I have not used any other ereaders except for playing with a Sony in store but I fully recommend the latest kindle.

I do have a few issues with it though,

Sorting books is very primitive, you have very little control over how they are sorted and can’t simply keep them all in folders.
Many of the features are simply not active yet, there is supposed to be an app store eventually but there’s no progress yet.
The internet access is classed as experimental so they could disable it if they get fed up of all the expense.
It’s by default misses out the cover of the book meaning unless you specifically look for it you might not even realise you have one.
No ePub support so no library access but there are plenty of free books available both directly from Amazon and on the net in mobi.
You can’t control the screensaver image and some of them are pretty crap.

[AMT]

I'd go with the Kindle. Free wifi and 3G, has a browser, and a great library of books.

[Jaevric]

Thanks. I'd been leaning towards the higher-end Nook rather than the Kindle, but I'll do a little more research on both (and see what books are available).

[loomer]

How's the Kindle handle PDFs now? I know it had trouble with them before.

[The Grim Squeaker]

What were those caveats, Grim? I was thinking of picking up a basic wi-fi K3 myself.

The keyboard is unnecessary and a big waste of space - the device could easily be smaller in it's dimensions while having a slightly bigger screen and "paddles".
It could REALLY use some form of external lighting, no matter how crapy. The travel cases are very expensive and bulky.
Document organizing is primitive and uncontrolled. iTunes is unimaginable superior
Could definetly use a touchscreen (Sony's readers do, and have smaller dimensions...for twice the cost ).
I'd also gladly give up the wifi if it meant shaving a few dollars of the price.

As the market stands however, it's the best ereader. (Whether it's worth buying if you already have a tablet or iPad or Galaxy tab is another matter. I'd say yes though, but only if weight and battery life are concerns for you).

[xthetenth]

I have a nook, and I quite like the thing. The problem is, I haven't been reading much fiction recently, so it's kinda been going to waste as I keep picking up history books that aren't in the store, so I don't have a well-developed opinion of the thing, other than it's nice to read on, annoying to turn pages on and I have no idea how kindle users deal with the screen being so slow while using the menu. I really like the touchscreen being available for the menu, even if it is cramped.

[Ypoknons]

Nook does epub and library books, so you can borrow from a public library using Overdrive. Kindle sounds nice, it's a closed environment but there's a good selection of books and content delivery is convienent, as long as you use their e-reader and phone/tablet/computer apps. Also I get the impression, from experience, Amazon sells more books outside the US than Kobo and the others (B&N doesn't at all). I'm using a Sony PRS-700 (glare hell) at the moment and I have a NOOKcolor (ok, not strictly a e-reader) on the way.

I actually own a Kindle DX, it's expensive enough that I can see how it would be a barrier against buying it but honestly I love it. I don't live in the US anymore so being able to buy new books through the Kindle 3-G is a godsend.

I know right? How are good English bookstores in Japan anyways?

[Todeswind]

The keyboard is unnecessary and a big waste of space - the device could easily be smaller in it's dimensions while having a slightly bigger screen and "paddles".
It could REALLY use some form of external lighting, no matter how crapy. The travel cases are very expensive and bulky.
Document organizing is primitive and uncontrolled. iTunes is unimaginable superior
Could definetly use a touchscreen (Sony's readers do, and have smaller dimensions...for twice the cost ).
I'd also gladly give up the wifi if it meant shaving a few dollars of the price.

What he said. The keyboard doesn't bother me as being a waste of space, it makes sense why they included it, but I'm not a very big fan of using it. It's just not a very ergonomic device. I don't necessarily feel they needed to include a touch screen but if they were to do so it would make more sense to have a touch screen keyboard than the traditional button one (but I'm not really sure what that would end up doing to battery life).

[Jawawithagun]

Kindle sounds nice, it's a closed environment but there's a good selection of books and content delivery is convienent, as long as you use their e-reader and phone/tablet/computer apps.

Closed environment? I can easily copy any ebook I need onto it without going their apps. It may not support the .epub format but .mobi is easy enough to convert to.

[Zed Snardbody]

I liked my nook as a piece of hardware, but more and more the books i wanted read weren't available on it but were on the kindle. I eventually gave up and just gave it to my mother who has less varied tastes in literature.

I'm kind of eying the nook color if only because they XDA community is close to rooting it, turning it into a decent android tablet that I can by for about 400$ less then a smasung tab, and then load the kindle app onto it! ....and angry birds.

[Freefall]

I have a Nook and think it's great. I haven't played too much with a kindle, but I figure they are about the same really, with some minor differences. The Sony and Kindle DX are apparently the way to go if you plan on reading a lot of PDFs, but otherwise they seem really expensive for what they do.

I would suggest going to a store and checking out both devices directly. The nook is obviously at B&N and I think places like Fry's or Target (I forget exactly which stores, but at least one chain carries them). Likewise, I believe kindles are carried at some chain or other now, though I think they only have demo programs running. With the nook you get 2 weeks to return it for a full refund, and with the kindle I believe you get 30 days if you order from amazon. If you really wanted to, you could just get both, play around with them for 13 days, then return the one you don't like.


Okay, Nook vs. Kindle. The long, rambling, thorough version (you've been warned).

In my experience, about the only thing on the nook that annoys me sometimes is the glossy white plastic. If you're in direct sunlight, it can cause some annoying glare. It's a pretty minor complaint, but it's there. I've been thinking about getting a skin for it to clear that up. The matte finish on the new kindles should obviously make this a complete non-factor for them.

One thing I really like though is the interface. When I first saw it, I figured the touch screen was just a gimmick to try and move units, but after playing with it a bit, I quickly realized how nice it is to have the responsiveness of a normal LCD for menu navigations. Doing it on a kindle must be pretty tedious in comparison. Also, it lets you see little thumbnails of the actual covers of the books. That's a pretty minor aesthetic touch, but I find it nice.

One thing you might want to look into is the screen contrast. The new kindles have a much higher contrast screen. I think they may have adjusted the contrast on the nook with the new 1.5 update, but I'm not entirely sure (when I finished updating mine, I could swear the text looks darker, and some people on a few discussion threads seem to have noticed a difference as well). So on that note, the kindle3 may technically be the better e-reader at this point.

Battery life is also less than the kindle, although frankly I doubt this should be too much of an issue. In airplane mode you should get about 10 days to a charge (although this depends on how much you use the touchscreen), whereas with the kindle you get 30. Big difference, but at the same time, I kind of doubt charging the device once a week is going to be that big a pain for most people.

The main thing most people should probably really look at are the books stores. B&N is pretty misleading with their claims on how many books they have. Most of their free books come from Google books, which anyone can get straight from Google (or you could go to Gutenburg, or any number of other free sites). This also means that they tend to have a lot of typos, don't have pre-made hyperlinks for chapters, and a lot of them are the exact same book over and over, with just a difference in publication year or company (a simple search for "Dracula 0.00" turns up 4 results; when you consider how many works seem to give at least this many results, it's not hard to figure the claims of a million free books could realistically be off by a factor of at least 2 or 3; incidentally, "works of William Shakespeare" returned over 1,600 results).

Still, the reality is both bookstores provide more material than anyone is ever going to actually read in their lifetime. The main thing to do is think if there are any deal breakers you would absolutely need for the device and check if only one store carries it. I think Amazon technically has more, but B&N seems very serious about supporting their product, so I doubt they are going to let too many major releases and bestselling titles slip through their fingers, but more esoteric works could be a different story.

One thing B&N does do is offer little discounts in store if you have your nook with you, and give away free ebooks weekly (current books, not public domain or Google books; though they are random, which means you will probably only get something you never planned on reading anyway). There was a period when they were putting up a lot of their B&N Classics books for free download, which was very nice for me. Of course, if you have no interest in going to a B&N, some of that won't apply (they do offer free books just over their online store though, so you don't miss out on all the opportunities).

The main reason I personally bought a nook was because of sideloading and native pdf support. At the time, I was under the impression that sideloading content from other sources was basically impossible with the kindle, and my main purpose was for reading public domain titles, so that really killed it for me. However, either my research was inadequate, or since then they've figured out an easy way to convert documents to kindle's format, because it sounds like lots of people do it now.

Another thing that appealed to me with the nook was the rate they updated the firmware. If you look at the reviews from 2009, most of them indicate it is basically a piece of junk. With pure software updating, they have since then increased the speed of page turns dramatically, added a "go to page" function, and allow sorting content into folders. There are also softrooting options that seem to have some nice organizational functions if you want to play with that. The rate at which the updates came out also just gave me the impression that B&N was very serious about supporting this product as well as they could; I personally like the idea that my new gizmo won't be dead or discontinued in 6 months.

On that note, if you get an e-reader of any sort, you might want to look into getting the free program Calibre. It allows you to easily arrange and convert a variety of documents and optimize them for your device, as well as easily edit data like title and author and such. Can't edit text directly with it though, which is a little disappointing, but it's still very cool. Calibre allowed me to take hundreds of html texts I had on my computer and convert them into very nice epubs with hyperlinked table of contents and footnotes and everything. Very cool.

[Todeswind]

I know right? How are good English bookstores in Japan anyways?

It depends on where you are. If you're in a major area it's relatively easy to get ahold of English media. I live in a rural area of the landlocked portion of Fukuoka about an two hours away from any major city. Tokyo and Osaka areas are certainly full of English media but the cities that are easier for me to get to, Fukuoka and Kitakyushu, aren't exactly westernized. They're certainly international but when it really comes down to it they're far more oriented to providing media to Korean and Chinese tourists than American residents.

If you're planning to live in Japan getting netflix (and hotspot shield so it can work outside the US) and an e-reader so you can easily get books is a must.

[Freefall]

No edit button here?

Just wanted to make a follow up to my post: other people have confirmed the nook 1.5 update improved the contrast, and have posted comparison pics, so it's probably about even with the kindle3 in that regard now. I was just confused because B&N did not list it as one of the features of the update, which seems like a very strange omission.

[Todeswind]

There are some minor issues that came with the contrast update (notably related to battery use) so the kindle is still the better buy, if only for the larger library of books. This is, of course, presuming that you're planing to use it for it's stated purpose rather than as a platform for something else.

The aforementioned "android tablet" for example would be better served (as well as only possible on) the Kindle as of yet (well soon but the point stands).

[Freefall]

There are some minor issues that came with the contrast update (notably related to battery use) so the kindle is still the better buy, if only for the larger library of books. This is, of course, presuming that you're planing to use it for it's stated purpose rather than as a platform for something else.

The aforementioned "android tablet" for example would be better served (as well as only possible on) the Kindle as of yet (well soon but the point stands).

Really? Do you know any specifics? I've only had it for a couple of days, so I haven't had to recharge yet anyway. The only thing I've noticed so far that's really weird is the way the "home" screen apparently has to refresh twice now when I wake it up.

[Todeswind]

It simply takes more energy to use the higher contrast, so it drains the battery faster. Its pretty straightforward and really not a "glitch" so much as a tradeoff for better contrast. I don't know the figure offhand but I have it on my home computer. The Nooks main failing when compared to the Kindle in terms of performance is usually battery life, mostly because the nook has a great many more functions and doodads attached. So if those functions are important to you then go with the nook, if they're not the kindle is a better choice.

It really comes down to a matter of preference because the devices really are so similar.

[Todeswind]

The aforementioned "android tablet" for example would be better served (as well as only possible on) the Kindle as of yet (well soon but the point stands).

Sorry about the double post but I noticed an error in what I said, I meant to say Nook here, not Kindle.

Sorry for the confusion.

[darkwolf29a]

I bought a nook. My art school is going to electronically formatted books. So, while they give you the software to put on your computer, it still means that you are stuck to a computer reading an assignment. So, I "print" my book to a pdf and dump the file to my nook. Honestly....it works like a charm. The only thing I wish I could do is zoom in a little bit. Right now, I'm reading an art history book and the font is VERY small....I almost need a maginfying glass. LOL

But, for regular reading and such....I love the thing. I do only have the wifi version, because I do not really need to get to the internet...and if I do, I'll just download the book to my laptop or desktop (dpending on where I am) and dump it on.

[Phantasee]

Wouldn't it be suboptimal for an art history book? All the texts I've ever seen were full of full-colour illustrations.