Decide what to buy: the Reevoo.com blog

Books have hardly changed for hundreds of years.  Sure, the adventures of a boy wizard or everyone’s favourite cannibal psychiatrist might surprise a Victorian reader, but the form the story comes in would be all too familiar. You might have the latest home cinema set-up and the smartest of smartphones, but still be absorbing your reading material using something that was old hat in Dicken’s time.

And then came the eBook reader, dragging the humble novel into the forefront of gadgety cool.  eReaders have been around for over a decade, but it was Amazon’s accessible Kindle (coming complete with wireless access to Amazon’s impressive ebook shop) which started their move to the mainstream.

Since the dawn of the Kindle era, Amazon has brought out a second generation of readers, now available in the UK, and the Kindle DX, with a screen big enough to read a daily paper on (available USA only).  Sony has jumped into the market with three readers, including a nifty touchscreen eReader, while Interead has made the iPod Nano of eReaders, the Cool-ER, which comes in a range of cheerful colours.  Bookeen’s also got into the game in the UK, while across the pond and the channel it seems like a new reader is announced every month or so.  And of course there’s an app (or rather, a thousand apps) for reading books on your iPhone or smartphone.

So what’s the point of this upgrade to the familiar paperback? Convenience has got to be top of the list of eReaders’ advantages. You can carry dozens or even hundreds of books around with you in something that smaller and lighter than one hardback.  This alone should be enough to convince booklovers who struggle to squeeze swimming costumes into holiday suitcases filled with books, or anyone who’s ever finished their book in the first half hour of a long train journey and had to spend the rest of it staring at other passengers or reading the train company’s in-flight magazine.

What are the other advantages?

• the small size is also an advantage at home: just think what you could do with the room that you’d otherwise need to store books
• the ability to enlarge the text is a real boon if you’ve got less than perfect eyesight
• searchable text helps you pinpoint that witty phrase ready for you to drop into conversation
• you can bookmark pages (and sometimes make notes) - and these bookmarks don’t fall out
• while the eReader may be quite pricey, eBooks are generally cheaper than paper books
• eBooks can be bought from online shops at any time of day or night and are instantly available - no need to go to a bookshop or wait for a delivery
• free books: as of August 2009, there were 2 million free ebooks available online, including almost everything published before 1900 and many promotional give-aways of new books
• eBooks are more eco-friendly, using 3 times more water and 78 times more raw materials

Many of the obvious objections to eReaders have actually already been overcome.  If the idea of reading on screen puts you off, you should know that all the current models of eReaders use E-Ink screens, which have no backlighting and are as easy to read as paper.

Battery life is also longer that you’d expect: the main drain on battery for ereaders are WiFi connections (for some) and ‘turning’ the page.  A single charge on an eRreader without WiFi usually lasts for around two weeks’ worth of page turning, while WiFi-enabled ebook readers will stretch one charge up to 4 days with WiFi switched on, and up to a week if you switch it off.

One problem that’s gradually being overcome in newwer generations of eReaders is DRM, or Digital Rights Management, on eBooks.  DRM is the same thing that used to stop you copying and sharing music bought from iTunes.  It prevents you lending eBooks to friends or selling them on second-hand.

Difficulties can also be caused by eBook formats: there are lots of different file types used for eBooks, from the widely-accepted ‘open’ ePub format, to formats which work only on certain readers, like Amazon’s exclusive Kindle format.  It can be very difficult or even impossible to change devices without losing your eBook library because not all readers accept all formats of eBooks.  To futureproof your library, the best advice at the moment is to go for an eReader that accepts ePub files, and buy as many of your eBooks as possible in this format.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jblyberg/ / CC BY 2.0

Now we’ve dealt with the basics, look out for part 2 of the beginner’s guide to ereaders, in which I’ll take you through the readers currently available in the UK.  If you’ve got any questions in the meantime, or anything’s not clear, let me know in the comments.

Tags: amazon, beginner's guide to ereaders, cool-er, e-book, e-reader, ebook readers, eBooks, ereaders, Kindle, sony reader

Blog posted on Thursday, November 26th, 2009 at 10:52 pm under ereaders. Leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.