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Ebook readers
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Being the environmentally conscious fellow that i am, I've been looking with some interest at some Ereaders for a while and was wondering if anyone on the forums has had any experience with them. The two I'm looking at are amazon's Kindle 2 or Barnes and Nobles Nook. I know Kindles been around for a while and has a very large chunk of the market share, so i know if i buy that one i have little fear of it going under and me being stuck with a EReader that can't get new content, But the Nook has some really good features such as expandable memory (both can already hold around 1,500 books but i like the option of holding more), replaceable batteries, and you don't have to get PDF files converted(this is useful since you can download alot of public domain books and just put them on a Nook for free). supposively you will also be able to take your Nook into any Barnes and Nobles and get special discounts or content there. They both cost around the same amount, so does anyone here have any views on the subject?
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I'd effin love to own one , as I generally need a lot of technical documentation at extremely remote locations.(read:I need the books offline).I've done it with limited success with my old Palm , but it was slow and clunky and battery life was dismal.The prices are just too high for me at present and hopefully competition will bring down the prices a little.
The Nook seems to be the technically superior device , though it's still very early days for the device.Personally I'd sit on the fence for a while before splashing some money on one of these devices. -
[quote="djdrastic"]
The Nook seems to be the technically superior device , though it's still very early days for the device.Personally I'd sit on the fence for a while before splashing some money on one of these devices.
I agree with that, but as the Ipod has shown us a technically superior product doesn't always mean it'll be the best selling product. -
The Nook is based on Android which means we may be seeing some interesting hacks coming out for it after it's released to the wild. As it is right now I'd get a Nook even without the Android implications because of the PDF and ePub compatibility out of the box.
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I found a program that can convert from the Kindle format to EPUB (which works on the NooK) so i most likely will go with the Nook. If the Nook goes under i can still use the Kindle store and just convert it to EPUB.
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I don't know if you'd be interested in this, but the Ipod Touch has a free Kindle application that lets you read Kindle books on it. It's pretty good as far as I can tell, and it's nice to have a device that's a little more versatile then an e-reader.
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Kindle app on my ipod is what I use for books. The screen may be smaller but it's not too bad. Though, I do stick to mostly audible books these days as I have 6 hours alone in a building where I'm constantly moving. That's a lot of time to consume a book while working.
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The only thing i have against the Kindle app (which really isn't the apps fault) is after about 5 minutes of reading on it my eyes start to hurt.
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Try changing the colors and font size? I use the sepia colored one, it's easier on my eyes. I also lower the screen brightness to about 25%.
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Yeah; sepia and lower brightness works well for me. Some people have very reactive pupils, and the pure white with high brightness makes their eyes close off so much that they can't focus on the letters.
And some people are just weird about computer screens in general. A guy I used to work with would pull all the tubes out of the flourescent lights above his cube and the neighboring cubes because he insisted that the light combined with the light from his screen and gave him instant migraines. There was a huge flap between him and the maintenance staff over pulling the tubes out, so he gave up and made a big cardboard hood that covered his head and the computer screen. -
I went on a half week long vacation and decided to purchase a Kindle to use during my free time. I haven't completely finished a book in 3 years and I thought that the Kindle might help invigorate my book laziness.
I loved the weight and size of the Kindle. Along with the ability to download without having wi-fi or needing a computer connection. It's fairly easy to use and the battery life was good. My problem though, was that I could not get past the cost of the books that Amazon is pricing them for. Selling brand new top of the bestsellers list books for 9.99? That's a fantastic price. 1/3 of what it would cost to buy it in a bookstore. But selling Watership Down for 13 bucks, when the hard copy was 11 dollars makes no sense. I was able to get a service that allowed for downloads of books that were out of copyright protection, but I would of rather bought some more recent (last 60 years) books. I did enjoy the new papers' digital content. The New York Times, a paper that I buy whenever I get the chance, sells a copy of their paper for a dollar (half off a physical copy) and it comes with extended articles. And the monthly subscription is 20 bucks. All the papers give a free 14 day trial and I was able to try out a half a dozen of paper's I'd probably never be able to get any other way.
The kindle is a good idea if you are a person who regularly buys new books, but for everyone else I dont think it's worth giving up your local library for. -
Man, every time I get a new LCD monitor I have to crank the brightness as low as it will go. Those damn things are blinding to me. I feel ya.
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Ok I nearly made a new thread but lucky I searched and resurrected an old thread. My birthday is coming up in September, and being one who has almost everything, I am thinking about pressing my family for an ebooks reader.
Now generally, I prefer musty second hand books to the concept of electronic books but a) I understand hard copies are going the way of vinyl records, b) the books I've been reading tend to give me back-aches, and c) a lot of the books I've been tending to read are by authors long since dead, so I can cash in on public domain
So, now; what would people recommend? I'm thinking one with no wifi or net or other media applications or I will just use it to do non-productive stuff (which is pretty much my iPhone). So not an iPad or tabletty thing.
Thoughts? Amazon the way to go?
A closing thought: I'd be inclined to by books still, stick them on the shelf and somehow find a free-ish version of the books. -
I want one of those things just so I can load it down with PDFs of court opinions. It's so fucking expensive and inefficient to print opinions in full, and if you're on the go, it's murder on your eyes to try and read them on a phone. So how is the PDF support?
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I like the nook's rubbery back, big physical page turn buttons, and sd card, but the major readers are mostly identical and it's trivially easy to convert books into whatever format you need with Calibre.
If the pdfs don't have flowable text, trying to read them on the little eink screens is generally terrible, they're not suited to zooming and scrolling around. the kindle DX is bigger, but it's so expensive you might as well just get an ipad.
