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.

Comments

I have the Kindle, and recommend it

[illumin8]

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.

The XO from OLPC?

[Ugmo]

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

        * 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 one that isn't Sony

[Ted Cabeen]

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. 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.