Ereader

Craguls

I'm getting sick of lugging around heavy books for college so I'm considering picking up an ebook reader pretty soon. What are peoples experiences with them? Good? Bad?
I'd be mainly using them for .pdf files.

Feel free to make any recommendations as to personal favourites as well.

mikeruurds

I've just purchased the new Bebook Neo which will handle PDFs and most other formats. It also has Wifi and an SD expansion slot.

I'll let you know what it's like.

mobius42

Got a Kindle DX about a month ago, previously had a Sony PRS-505. It's fantastic. The 9.7" screen makes pdfs readable (the 6" on the 505 was too small for me to comfortably read them) and it comes with 4GB of storage and free wireless access to Wikipedia. Books you buy from amazon can by synced between the Kindle, your PC and iPhone so if you're on the bus or something and want to read a few pages, it'll update where you stopped on your phone and push it out to the Kindle. You can add your own books by plugging it into your PC and there's loads of good free books available on sites like feedbooks.com. Books are generally cheaper than the shops too.
If you want to you can check it out here: http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Wireless-Reading-Display-Generation/dp/B0015TG12Q
Only disadvantage? The price: around €400. Worth it for me considering how much reading I do and how much I can save on buying books, but maybe not for everyone.

If you are going to be using the reader mostly for pdfs, particularly textbooks, I would recommend that whatever one you get, get one with a large screen, at least 9". Pdfs are hard to read at a smaller size and not all of them can be reflowed for smaller screens.

digitaldolf

Hi.
I bought a Sony reader PRS-600 touch. It has a touch screen and an inbuilt dictionary. It has a slight glare because of the extra layer on top and the contrast is also a bit lower because of the touch screen layer. The glare isn't a problem. You can change the angle ever so slightly and it's not there anymore. The lower contrast is not really a problem either because you can increase the font size in low light situations. There are also covers for sale with inbuilt lights. (one from Sony and M-Egde has covers and seperate lights as well http://www.medgestore.com/products/prs600-executive.psp )
The sony reader is made out of metal and very sturdy. The touch screen works well and I love the dictionary function.
Whatever you do; don't buy it in Argos. They sell it for €368 while you can buy it in Powercity for €249.95. I went to Harvey Norman who have it for €286 but I talked them down to €249 when I told them about Powercity.
E-readers are not great in handling PDF's.
You can download Calibre, a free e-book management application that also converts PDF's, HTML and other formats into ePub; the format best suited for the Sony reader.
The sony PRS-600 has a 6 inch screen which is fine. The reader easily fits into a pocket. I wouldn't go any smaller. A 5 inch screen is too small in my opinion, especially when you read with the font set to large. You would be flipping pages constantly. 6 inch is fine though.

The advantage of buying a Sony (or any other reader that isn't Kindle) is that you can buy books anywhere. With a Kindle you can only buy from Amazon.
You can also find loads of books on the www for free. (just google: ebooks+author+torrent) or google for boards and forums with e-books. Personally I would never go for a Kindle because of the Amazon limitation.
Good luck.

Accountsplus

digitaldolf wrote: »

Hi.
The advantage of buying a Sony (or any other reader that isn't Kindle) is that you can buy books anywhere. With a Kindle you can only buy from Amazon.
You can also find loads of books on the www for free. (just google: ebooks+author+torrent) or google for boards and forums with e-books. Personally I would never go for a Kindle because of the Amazon limitation.
Good luck.

Just to correct the above mis-information.
You can buy books for the kindle from fictionwise, books-on-board, manybooks.net, baen books, diesel books.
It also reads mobi format.
You can get the public domain books from Feedbooks.com.

So far, any books I bought came from Amazon - cheapest by far.
I get my public domain books from feedbooks.
For more information, Look at mobileread.com - there's info there about all ereaders and accessories.

Caliber works with the kindle.

parsi

+1 .

Most of the books on my kindle are not from amazon. They were sourced elsewhere and popped on without any issues - Calibre is an ideal program for that.

However amazon is very handy for downloading free samples no matter where you are...

digitaldolf

I stand corrected. Sorry for the confusion. I was under the impression that Kindle still only worked with Amazon.
Anyway, there are a lot of different brands out there and you might want to have a look at the mobileread forums http://www.mobileread.com/forums/index.php dedicated to e-readers and everything to do with e-readers.

Accountsplus wrote: »

Just to correct the above mis-information.
You can buy books for the kindle from fictionwise, books-on-board, manybooks.net, baen books, diesel books.
It also reads mobi format.
You can get the public domain books from Feedbooks.com.

So far, any books I bought came from Amazon - cheapest by far.
I get my public domain books from feedbooks.
For more information, Look at mobileread.com - there's info there about all ereaders and accessories.

Caliber works with the kindle.

Accountsplus

I have just spotted this recent thread on mobileread.com and it has a couple of other sources that I had forgotten i.e. smashwords, kobo, Add All, O'Reilly, eHarlequin and another good source of information for any owners of any ereader www.inkmesh.com.

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=73376

There's lots of choices.

robinph

You cannot buy any DRM'ed books for the Kindle from anywhere but Amazon is probably what thy meant to say.

I have the Sony PRS-300 myself and am very happy with it. As said above though if you put it on the large font it is a bit small screen wise, but I'm reading most of the time in the small or medium font, I would prefer a size half way between the two personally. Calibre is definately worth making use of, it's free afterall, ad I've had a few of their scripts setup to download news websites into books for then reading on occasion as well. I've already got way more books than I need loaded onto the reader as well so the memory being limited isn't a issue really.

Diairist

does this need adobe digital editions before downloading from e.g. waterstones.com? I heard they were incompatible

Does it need 'reader library software' PC version 3.1 from the Sony site too?

thanks!

robinph

I've got books bought from WHSmiths loaded onto my Sony no problem using ADE. The biggest problem was dealing with the .co.uk websites and the restrictions that they put on what books you can access from which country.

Owen

There should be a price crash soon enough with eReaders - with the iPad coming in at 500 Euro, it's hard to justify the Kindle DX at 400. A survey a few months back on Slashdot said that the average price a consumer was willing to spend for an eReader was about 100 Euro - and given the (lack) of technology inside, it won't be long before the cheaper units hit this price point.

nibtrix

If you're looking for a cheap ereader I recommend the Astak EZReader. It's about $150, has a good range of formats that it can read and for me anyway seems practically unbreakable (I've dropped it about 20 times, including onto concrete and it's still perfect, not even scratched).

They've just added ADE so you can now buy copy-protected eBooks in PDF and ePub formats too.

If you have the money you might want to go for something fancier but it's definitely a good option for a cheapie...

Log-on

i was thinking of getting one of these for my gf shes in ucd and constantly buying expensive book but i looked online and i cant seem to find half of the book she needs for her course, is there a brand that has more selection then others?

IrishPhoenix

The Kindle wifi is €149 and the screen on it is brilliant. I upgraded to it from the Sony 505. But any small e-readers aren't going to be great for PDF. You'd be much better to convert them to epub unless they are image heavy.

P.S - Didn't mean to help revive an ancient thread. I didn't see the date on the first posts until after I'd posted!

Log-on

any word on the best place to get the ebooks? im starting law myself and the books are super pricey so would hope ebooks are better value

Log-on

Log-on wrote: »

any word on the best place to get the ebooks? im starting law myself and the books are super pricey so would hope ebooks are better value

many books aren't available in digital format.

Enderol

Hi guys, sorry to be picking up this thread again and brushing it down.

Any opinions about current or future ereaders that can read PDFs? I'm looking for one that can read more technical books so tables and diagrams would be important. Wouldn't be going tablets because my job may take me to the back ass of nowhere so want to have something that works for a few days between charges.