Which eBook Reader is the Best?

Mistress.Erin writes "I cannot decide between Amazon's Kindle and Sony's Reader. I've read some reviews, but their motives can be somewhat suspect. So, I come to the most tech savvy group around to ask: which eBook reader is the best? If not Kindle or Reader, then what?" We've discussed this question before, but things have changed a bit since 2005.

Suspicious motives?

I've read some reviews, but their motives can be somewhat suspect.

I'm actually more curious about why you wrote that than I am about the eBook readers in question.

The one that isn't Sony

if you need an explanation as to why "not Sony," you don't read /. enough.

Re:The one that isn't Sony

It seems to me that "not Amazon" is about an equal push so we are back to which one.

Re:The one that isn't Sony

It seems to me that "not Amazon" is about an equal push so we are back to which one.

Unless of course someone can nominate a third option with features comparable to the ones on offer from the other two corporate behemoths. My dream eBook reader would have support for txt, pdf, html, rtf, doc, and maybe a couple of the actual eBook formats, have an e-ink display with a optional light (for reading in the dark), have some form of wireless (either wifi or cell), and be small enough to fit in your pocket without needing a crowbar. They're getting pretty close at this point, but I don't think any of the ones on offer quite hit all the bullet points.

Re:The one that isn't Sony

Unless of course someone can nominate a third option with features comparable to the ones on offer from the other two corporate behemoths.

Ask and you shall receive:
http://www.bookeen.com/ebook/ebook-reading-device.aspx [bookeen.com]

It supports the same DRM mobibook format that the Kindle does, also has unencumbered support for HTML, PDF and more, doesn't have the ugly casing or awkward controls that the Kindle has. And yes - it runs Linux.

Happy to help,
-H.

Re:The one that isn't Sony

Well, the OLPC XO-1 handles most of those formats and has a daylight low power reading mode and a screen that flips around for tablet reading. Mine arrived yesterday. It is one of the coolest things I have ever play with. Completely silent too, won't bother folks around you in a quiet coffee shop. Has an SD card slot and wireless. Battery has good life and handles 2000 recharge cycles. Not quiet pocket sized though ;).

Re:The one that isn't Sony

I know Amazon has been really bad in communicating this, but you can copy non-proprietary formats to the Kindle for free. TXT files are supported natively, and most other files can be converted to Mobipocket files (.mobi) by the Mobipocket conversion tools [mobipocket.com]. Once you have either a TXT or .MOBI file, you can copy it to the Kindle over the supplied USB cable. The $.10 transfer fee is only to use Amazon's converter and to copy the file across the Sprint wireless network. Yes, your HTML files aren't natively supported, but you can pretty easily convert those to MOBI (you may lose the hyperlinks, but the images should come through) and use them on a Kindle.

Neither...

Don't support DRM technology.

I own some readers

I own the original Sony Reader. If you mostly download your own books, then the new (PRS-505) Sony Reader is better than the Kindle. The Amazon ebook store is the biggest around, but it's still nothing compared to what is available in print. In fact, it's nothing compared to what's available on IRC.

The best ebook reader around, however, is the Ebookwise 1150. The LCD screen doesn't have great resolution, but it has instant page-flip. The price can't be beat. The back-lighting is wonderful for night reading.

If I were Amazon, I would have released a cheap reader to go along with my expensive reader. Something like the 1150, with just one or two modern improvements (USB file transfer).

Tags

I'd just like to say, whoever tagged this 'jetsvssharks', I salute you for bringing Broadway musicals into a story about eBook readers.

Which reader?

Personally I find both Kindle and Sony's reader too large. I use a Toshiba E805 PocketPC with VGA (640x480) to read books with either EReader.com's free reader or Mobipocket. The price is equivalent, about $400, but you can do far more with the PDA, it will surf the web decently, show movies, play games, play music, etc. You can even get a phone PDA that will let you download books and all kinds of other stuff over the air. I have a T-Mobile Dash and although small the screen is definately good enough to read books on too.

iPod Touch....not

It probably should be the iPod Touch, but the bloody thing doesn't allow viewing/opening/saving locally stored pdf's, unless you jailbreak it and install apache, php and god knows what else. Such a WASTE!

I have the Kindle, and recommend it

I would recommend the Kindle for only one big reason:

- Text search capability

It's hard to believe that in 2007, the latest Sony reader has no ability to search through the text of a book. This is important for technical reference manuals and textbooks, and was a dealbreaker for me. I don't use the Kindle store (other than to purchase one book when I first got it), so I leave the wireless off to save batteries.

I find the Kindle is dead simple to use. Plug it into your computer with USB, drag some Mobipocket, RTF, or TXT files onto it (convert your .PDFs with free Mobipocket creator), and there you go. No DRM necessary, unless you buy books from the Kindle store.

Also, some people will complain about no native PDF support on the Kindle. This is not a bad thing. Sony reader displays PDFs, but shrinks an entire 8.5x11 page down to the size of the tiny screen, so it's almost unreadable! This is why you must convert your PDFs into Mobipocket format first, so that the Kindle can resize the fonts, etc., and it becomes an actually readable e-book, and not a glorified thumbnail viewer.

Nokia N800 or N810

I'm not sure what kinds of eBooks the OP plans on reading, but using the Linux-based Nokia N800 [wikipedia.org] or N810 internet tablets as eBook readers using FBReader [fbreader.org] is pretty popular. You can use the tablet for lots of other cool stuff too. You won't be able to read DRM'd stuff though.

Sony PRS-505

I have the Sony PRS-505 and I love it. It feels wonderful. The screen is amazing (I believe it is the same screen as is used in the Kindle). I use linux, so I don't use the Sony Connect software. I use libprs500, which is a nice little program available for windows, linux and mac. I get my books from places like ebooks.com in Microsoft Reader (win2k in a virtual machine) format because the DRM can be broken and the files are easy to convert to a properly formatted PDF with OpenOffice. I only use the reader for reading books, so I can't speak to the quality of the music player. I can easily read 3000 pages on a charge. It is rated at 7500 page turns, but it still uses a tiny bit of power when it is just sitting there (unless you do an actual shutdown which is not obvious how to do and the startup time from completley off is significant). It took me about 25 pages of reading on the reader before I managed to stop admiring the device and get drawn into my book. Now, I can start reading a book and I almost forget I am using the reader.

Emacs.

Yeah, definitely Emacs. The only eBook reader that can read things to you with a Lisp...

Iliad Reader

Why not consider the Iliad? It's an open (linux) platform, has wifi, a better screen than either of the others, and you can annotate books & make notes w/ the stylus. A bit pricier, tho:

http://www.irextechnologies.com/products/iliad [irextechnologies.com]

The XO from OLPC?

The XO Laptop display is visible in full daylight. Its software is completely open. It can read and display open formats like plain text and PDF. It can download the files from the Internet using WiFi. It has extremely low power consumption and if you find yourself too far away from an outlet, you can charge it yourself. For the cost of a Kindle from Amazon you can buy an XO and donate one to a child.

From the specs page of the XO PC at One Laptop Per Child:

http://laptop.org/laptop/hardware/specs.shtml [laptop.org]

        * Liquid-crystal display: 7.5" Dual-mode TFT display;
        * Viewing area: 152.4mm × 114.3mm;
        * Resolution: 1200 (H) × 900 (V) resolution (200 DPI);
        * Monochrome display: High-resolution, reflective sunlight-readable monochrome mode; Color display: Standard-resolution, Quincunx-sampled, transmissive color mode;
        * LCD power consumption: 0.1 Watt with backlight off; 0.2-1.0 Watt with backlight on;
        * The display-controller chip (DCON) with memory that enables the display to remain live with the processor suspended; the display and this chip are the basis of our extremely low power architecture; the display controller chip also enables deswizzling and anti-aliasing in color mode.

Re:The XO from OLPC?

I bought one, and I am very impressed with the screen (not so much with the keyboard). It costs the same as the Kindle (for us), and does so much more, and has more pixels.

Posting this from my XO.

Owner of both Kindle and Sony Reader

Two reasons that there is value to an ebook reader over PDA or laptop:

1. The eInk screen is substantially easier to read. The Sony 2G is actually uncanny... looks like stickers stuck on the screen. The Kindle is much less contrasty and harder to read.

2. Battery life. eInk does not use significant power unless you are turning the page, so the battery life of these things is on the order of 1week plus with heavy usage. When I have used laptops or PDAs for reading, the batteries die quickly (before I want to stop reading).

Comparing the two.

Sony:
      Much more contrast on screen. Very easy to read.
      Smaller
      Lighter
      Much more intuitive user interface. It has multiple choice buttons for navigations.
      Better physical design with buttons in convenient positions
      Feels more solid and less cheap than Kindle
      Software allows you to retag and organize files.
      DRM and limited store is a big minus.
      Better multiple format support

Kindle:
      Staggeringly bad industrial design. Only really one good way to hold the thing without hitting one of the buttons which inexplicably are found on every side.
Want to turn up the contrast on the screen.
Bizaarr user interface that requires scrolling and multiple clicks with a secondary lcd screen to perform simple functions.
Keyboard take a lot of space.
No software to tag and oragnize files. So the list of files on the device is unweidly, long, and filled with incomprehensible tags from Gutenberg, Manybooks, or Fictionwise.
Very restrictive DRM which cancels out its advantage of having a much larger and easier to use store for books.
Wireless is good for subscribing to periodicals, not much else.
Amazon has a staggeringly inefficient mail-in system for conversion. No conversion has worked well so far, strange spacing and formatting even in simple documents.
They need simple PC software to manage the thing. The self-contained bit is inefficient and a waste of wireless and organization.

I figure there are three kinds of reader:

1. Like me - buy and keep books forever. Neither reader much good because DRM keep you from owning the books forever, just until the store dies or you want to change to a better competing reader.
2. Buy books read and resell - no right-of-resale with either device.
3. Buy "beach books" and throw them away. Both readers were made for you with the Kindle having a better store.

     

My experiences in selecting an ebook reader

Having just gone through this process, allow me to pass on what I learned about the process.

1) Know what you are getting into.
Ebooks have some great advantages. However:
* DRM is common
* books are pricey
* selection is very limited

If you're still interested, continue.

2) LCD vs Eink
I read a lot on my Palm. Now that I have an eink reader, I'm not going back, I never thought LCD was "hard" to read on until I read on something else. However, eink means $$$ and few choices, while there's a number of established as well as new LCD devices for much, much less. LCDs can also scroll, while the eink has a .5-2 second refresh time. LCDs can have color while eink hasn't gotten that far.

Your question implies you've picked, so we'll continue on, but others are recommended to visit a Borders and take a peek at a demo Sony Reader - the viziplex screen is pretty much the same for all the major eink readers.

3) Pros and Cons
There are basically 4 readers to choose from here (ignoring the fringe players):
Bookeen
Sony
Kindle
Iliad

Iliad has some real perks, but I wanted a reader not a computer, and certainly not $700 worth.

Bookeen has some nice features, but after my painful Zaurus experience, I wanted to stick to something intended for my language and a little more commercial support. When I bought my reader, the Cybook was still finishing off the rough spots. It may now be worthy of consideration, as it has a much wider selection of formats than the Sony Reader.

Kindle - though it wasn't out when I got my reader, it came out shortly afterward. Major Pros are wireless access to snag books, improved book selection (still limited), and much better prices on books. Major Con is the highly restrictive DRM. That latter is what kept me content with my Sony.

Sony - My eventual choice. It takes props as one of the only technology choices I didn't quickly regret. It has its limitations, most notably the crappy book selection, even crappier prices, and the eink refresh time. But it does what it tries to do reliably well.

Here are the things about the Sony reader that the review may not cover (505 only, not always true for 500)

It's a USB Mass storage device - so you can install books from any computer. What's more, it takes SD cards (and memory sticks, but I haven't mucked with that), and when the card is in the reader and the reader is connected to the computer, the card also appears as a drive on the USB device. I've been able to use my Reader on multiple computers, Windows and Linux, with no issue. There is no need to use the Sony software except to download from their crappy bookstore.

You may see talk of a credit at the bookstore - that's for "Sony Classics" only, i.e. books you can grab off of Gutenburg for free. I recommend you turn to mobileread.com for your ebook needs and wait for Amazon et al to get a clue like they have (started) with Mp3s. Either way, don't factor the $100 credit into your comparison.

The Sony Reader can handle LRF (it's propriety but not necessarily DRM'ed format) well, offering hyperlinking and 3 levels of magnification along with landscape/portrait modes. It can also handle TXT (I believe the zoom offerings are the same). PDF is also handled, but (1) Not "Digital Editions" (Adobe's DRMed books) and (2) It only offers 2 "sizes". Most PDF books come across as very small even when I have it zoomed and landscape. RTF doesn't resize in my experience, but it works well enough. Notably HTML, Mobi, Palmdoc, Word doc, and Openoffice formats aren't supported.

Installing a book can be done with their crappy wanna-be Itunes like software...or you can drag and drop via USB and ignore that. I recommend the latter.

The charge for me, reading a couple of hours each day, is a little less than a week. It charges off of USB no problem, standard mini connector. Your current position in books is lost if it goes dry, but nothing else, including hard bookmarks. Aside from testing that it worked, I've not used the MP3 player option, so that's not factored in.

The screen refresh is (subjective) .5 to 2 seconds, presumably depending on whether it can hit the read-ahead cache. This makes it unnoticeable for normal reading, and painful for page flipping. It offers "Jump +/- 10 pages" as well as specific page selection, but no eink device is going to be useful for searching a book for a reference visually.

As a right-handed person, reading is very easy...I just read as normal (One-handed), and tap my thumb when I need to turn the page. In landscape mode there is a second set of "forward/back" buttons that is now located near my left thumb.

One cool thing I expected after reading up on eink was that the page would remain even after power-off, since the eink doesn't require constant power. Sadly, Sony chose to have the page blank when powering off, probably to reduce confusion, but the geek in me is sad.

Lastly, when you first get it and plug it in...nothing will happen. It takes a while (45 mins?) to charge from a dead battery before anything will appear on screen. The directions tell you to power it on after plugging it in...in my experience that makes no difference at all.

Oh, and for any one that cares, the case is fake leather, no animal products involved that I'm aware of.

Overall, it really leverages a lot of standards well, and I'm amazed (since it's a Sony product).

Hope that helps!

And free content....well, sort of.

The best e-book for me is not an eBook, but the good ol' old fashioned ones with covers!

I'm with you. And, I went to my local library and got a card. And now, I have access to thousands of titles for the cost of my tax dollars.

I think a big part of the popularity of the e-readers is because it's just another gadget. Folks will come up with plenty of rationalizations as to why they need it or how it's so superior to a book. But that's the consumer mentality, I guess. It goes the same for fast cars (need them to merge with traffic!), SUVs (safety after all and I have kids!), computers, cameras, etc...

Re:And free content....well, sort of.

Time to blow some karma.

What is it about the eBook articles on slashdot (a tech geek site FFS) that seems to bring all the Ludites out of the woodwork? I can understand people complaining about DRM, but at least half the negative posts are people saying eBooks are stupid and you should just buy the paperback. What's wrong with these people? Are they also going around campaigning for the return of the slide rule? I can appreciate if they give reasons why they think eBooks aren't ready yet, or what changes they'd like to see in eBooks, but just flat out condemning the technology for no reason other than they don't like it is silly.

Re:Ah, teh good old days

I've been using my iPhone to read books. Mannybooks.net has a bunch of free/CC novels up (try "Geek Mafia") in a variety of formats, including a couple for the iPhone. I've been surprised that the iPhone works so well for this, although I haven't tried to read for more than an hour at a time or so.

one word: OLPC

As I type on my new XO (just got it through the G1G1 program) in Black and white mode, I can attest to the screen's clarity. It is like reading a newspaper, and the refresh rate is far superior to both the sony/amazon readers. Sure, its "not a reader", it's bigger than the other readers and its only available for order for another two weeks. However, with the upcoming sw update it will have close to a day's worth of battery in reading mode. It is also about the same price as the readers, and it is a laptop w/ built in wifi. Show me a current ebook reader that you can go to a website and download your book/pdf/news story.

If you want a fast refresh, laptop capability and wifi enabled, go with the OLPC. And, did I mention you could accidentally drop it and spill you coffee on it and it will still work?