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Choosing an ebook reader
cyanide64
Registered User new member
Registered User new member
Anybody have any recommendations for an reader? I know that i could use a tablet but we just became home owners so that budget is really tight. One thing I would like it to be able to do is also use it to display PDF's properly. Cut down on lugging some of the gaming books.
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In terms of expense, it's much worse to buy a device that actually doesn't meet your needs than it is to save for a little while and get one that does.
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However, your eyes will thank you for e-ink if you plan to do any lengthy reading.
In my experience, the eye-strain thing varies greatly from person to person (potentially because of differences in reading habits moreso than any biological differences).
That said, e-ink does provide insane battery life. Unfortunately, it's an absolute no-go for games.
You might want to look at the kindle fire. It's not terribly pricey, and it seems like a pretty capable tablet for most people's needs. A friend of mine has it and loves it.
If your books are not in ePub/Mobi format, or they're not reflowable, or they're textbooks, or they have color images or complex tables, you'll want a tablet. At that point, you may not even want an e-reader, but instead a tablet PDF-reader.
As for tablets on a budget, the Nexus 7 just had a new version drop so the previous versions are cheap. I think the Galaxy Tabs are also cheap at Staples right now, and Costco. It's far better to spend a little more now on something that will actually work rather than save a little money on something that frustrates you and doesn't fill your needs, leading to it not being used and you eventually buying the more expensive thing anyway.
I find night-mode takes care of eye-strain when I do any reading on my phone or tablet.
The main problm I have with the paperwhite is... 2Gb internal storage? Really? Come on guys, just put in a SD Card slot and let me choose my own ludicrously huge, hilariously cheap storage capacity size of choice. What is this, 2004?
on one hand i can kinda agree but..i mean, in my experience your average 700 page, kindle formatted novel is about 3-400 KB, that's enough for 5000 novels, how much do you really need?
Depends on what all you're using it for. I've seen dictionaries that take up 500-600MB. Reference type stuff can add up quick.
Walmart's carrying a Hisense 7" tablet that has been getting solid reviews, comes in $99 and $150 variations, and has microusb and MicroSD. The $150 model also has HDMI out, and specs that fall between the original Nexus 7 and the new one.
There are also a ton of other solid tablets it the $129-$150 range, and if you can hold out a couple more months, Amazon will likely announce their new Kindle Fire updates in the Fall. I wouldn't be surprised to see the regular Fire drop down to $99, with another model claiming a space in the $150 range.
If you're really serious about PDF viewing and you don't want to deal with having to zoom in and out to read things on a tablet, then you probably want something on the "large" end of the tablet spectrum (see: the Galaxy Tab 3), and those generally aren't very cheap...
Of course there are rumors that B&N plans to discontinue the whole line entirely, so that may or may not influence the purchasing decision. If that's the case, I'm hoping for at least some legacy support in the event that I would ever need it (probably unlikely), or a firmware update that would literally turn it into a straight android operating system.
Also yes, the "night" mode (or any dark background, light print mode) does wonders for reducing eye strain when reading long term.
Everything.
I have thousands of free e-books on my hard drive. I could easily fit a thousand on the Kindle, but you cannot organize books on the Kindle before downloading them, and organizing them on the Kindle is a pain in the butt, so I only keep about 30-40 books on the Kindle at any given time.
The Kindle app for my iPhone and iPad handle lots of e-books better, but you still cannot organize them, so in practice, you only keep a few hundred e-books in the app.
If you mean something else, I'm not sure I follow. I would definitely not say that e-ink readers have trouble handling large numbers of books, so I don't want the OP to be scared of in thinking so.
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