Digital eBook readers – the good, the bad and…

One of the many suggestion I received from you guys lately was to write more posts about digital ebook readers, hence I’ll start a series of posts about those.

This is the first one, meant to explain as thorough as possible (without becoming boring) what are these devices and what are their pros and cons.

First, if you’ll look into a dictionary, you’ll see that an ebook is a piece of content or a book in electronic format. Hence, ebook readers are digital devices specially designed for using such types of content.

That’s only their primary purpose, in reality they come with a bunch of other features. So let’s see what you should expect from a digital electronic book reader.

The screen

Best electronic devices for reading books

I’m pretty sure you’ve all tried reading something on a laptop and found that those LCD screens can really give you headaches after a couple of hours of use. That’s not the case for ebook readers though, as they don’t use regular LCD displays. In fact, the technology used for them is called e-ink display and offers nearly the same experience as when reading from a regular paper book.

Thus, those displays won’t tire your eyes, but on the other hand, can only be used to display static content, like pictures and texts. Plus, most readers these days come with black-and-white screens. Thus, it’s pretty obvious devices with e-ink displays are only usable for reading books. In fact, they are no mach for any other digital device for this.

E-ink displays are not backlit though, that means you will be able to use them outside or in strong light conditions, but during the night, you’ll need an external light source. So just like with a regular book.

Also, because of how e-ink technology works, it takes around a second (more like 0.3-0.5 s for newer devices) to refresh content. It would be great to have touch input on these displays, but it’s not yet the case (although touch and color e-ink displays will be available soon).

The clip below, a comparison between the Kindle 3 and the iPad, will better show you the differences between the e-ink display on the Kindle and a regular LCD display on that iPad.

Others

So, we’ve established the digital ebook readers are meant for reading. Great. But that’s not it. You can display pictures too or store music to play while reading. Plus, you can use them for websurfing, as long as you plan to read RSS Feeds and static pages with lots of texts. They won’t be able to run animated content though, like Flash clips, movies, games, etc.

Ebook readers are great when traveling. They are compact and light and on a regular device you can store hundreds or thousands of titles. It’s also fairly easy to get new content, all you’ll need in most cases is a Wi-Fi connection (and money on your credit card ).  And with battery life around 2-4 weeks on a single charge, they can easily last for your entire vacation.

Electronic books

Now, ebooks are available from a majority of sources. However, most of them aren’t free and come with DRM.

Tons of books in a sleek and light gadget

Digital readers will handle usual files, like TXTs and PDFs, or DOCs,XLXs with conversion. Each popular reader actually uses a proprietary file format also, but there are also some default collections, like the ePUB from Google, where you can find lots of titles cheap or for free. However, not all digital readers work with ePUB files. We’ll get into more details about this in a future post and when speaking about each important product separately.

So, if you won’t mind paying for your content, you won’t really care about this aspect. However, if you already have a vast collection of ebooks or want to get content for free or as cheap as possible (although you won’t be able to find new titles and bestsellers), you’d better make sure those files will work on the digital reader you want to get, before actually buying it.

Popular ebook readers

There aren’t many such devices right now. The most popular are by far Amazon Kindle (available as a 6 incher or as the bigger DX, with a 9.7 display), Barnes&Nobles Nook (6 inch) and Sony’s Readers (also available in a couple of different sizes). There are some other to come though, from big brands like Acer or Asus. More details about each of them in future posts.

eBook readers vs Touch tablets

With the iPad, there were many voices stating ebook readers are dead. Well, they are definitely not, simply because they are still unbeatable at their task: reading books. Reading on a touch-tablet is for sure possible, however you get the LCD display with a couple of inconveniences (poor viewing angles; glare surface; back-lit, thus tiring for your eyes, etc).

Of course, touch tablets are more versatile and can be used for lots of other things. However, handheld digital readers are smaller, more compact, lighter and cheaper. Plus, you get those e-ink displays, with their goods and bads.

Conclusions

Having tried a bunch of readers and a bunch of tablets/ tablet netbooks in these last years, I can say digital readers are far superior for reading all kind of content. They are not perfect, no device is, but for reading and traveling, they are the best.

You can get content easy and that great battery life, all in a device that is compact, light and affordable. In fact, good 6 inch readers go these days for around 150 bucks and even less in the States, while content is available for various prices (most best sellers for instance go for $9.99 – $12.99 , while their printed counterparts are at least twice more expensive). So, the actual readers redeems themselves after the first 15-20 titles bought, and you do get to have all those titles with you, wherever you might go.

That’s about it for today but look forward for more posts on digital ebook readers in the near future. And if you have questions or something to add to this post, please comment. I’ve tried explaining as many things while keeping the post as simple as possible.

Tags: Asus EEE Reader, ebook reader

Last updated: March 27, 2012 | Published: September 14th, 2010 | See the comments or add yours!