The forum has been a bit quiet these past few days, so I thought I'd put up this poll and see whether I can get a few more people to vote than on the Piracy/ebook Poll... :scholar:

Please post your reasons and if you choose option 4 then give us an idea what you're waiting for.

Please post your reasons and if you choose option 4 then give us an idea what you're waiting for.

iRex Iliad - my choice. It seems to be the only one that is available (or will be soon) in the U.S. and doesn't to be based on DRM.

Sony Reader - Unit doesn't natively support PDF which means protected PDFs won't be of any use. Sony has a poor track record on DRM and don't see Sony changing their stripes anytime soon. The Sony Reader seems to be built on a business concept of "we control the content" which is uncompetitive - which means "bad" for the consumer.

Hanlin V2 (or V8) - I don't see this available in English and the U.S.

PDA/Smartphone - This is what I am currently using. Unfortunately, PDFs don't display well on the tiny screen. Text and RTF content works fine, though.

I normally read using a Palm TX, but I'm really interested in having an eInk device -- but a borrowed Sony Librie showed me just how horrific strict DRM could be. So the iRex is appealing, with its open formats and simple file transfer (that was the other thing about the Librie: even if you could get your own files into the correct format, it wasn't simply a matter of copying the resulting file onto a memory stick... you had to use a special tool, etc. Bleah!)

If I'm going to get a device in the next few months, it will definitely be the Sony. The iRex is way too expensive. If the price comes down after a while, I might reconsider.

Definitely the Iliad, for one main reason, and several smaller ones: screen size. I have been waiting for years now for a book-sized screen, not smaller, not larger. I might be quirky, but I think a standard paperback is the ideal size for comfy eye travel (both across and down). I copied the Sony Reader's and Iliad's size onto an A4 paper and it was clear to see: the Reader is still too small.

The fact that the Iliad has a Wacom-type touch screen is great, too, although I won't be using it much other than for "just a second while I scribble your phone number down", but my husband will probably be doodling his icon designs on it. If my area's newspaper becomes e-suscribable, count me on for that too. And I have too many txt and html files to start converting the lot to some other format, it's time-consuming enough as it is, too make sure they're xhtml and not just standard html, but if the Reader's screen size had been "decent" (IMO), I might well have bought it for cheapness sake. :p

The fact that the Iliad is so expensive IS a hiccup in the decision process, but the other readers just don't provide what I want, so I'll be forking out my euros, with any luck, in a week or so. :D

Ela.

I prefer Jinke V8/V2. Now V8 supports english, russian and ukranian very fine, supports them in txt, xhtml, and UI can be in theese languages too.

I suppose, Sony and Jinke will be available at the same time in Russia, but V8 is cheaper, has 2-nd screen, more open, doesn't make me buy any stupid content and so on.
And I can watch the changes, taking place with V8 now - and I like this changes!

To pay $800 for Irex - it is too much for a book I need. I really needn't touch screen, wifi, drawing in a book.

It's the Iliad for me.

A batterylife that is longer than the 10 minutes (on a good day) that I get out of my Cybook sounds very good.

The price is not much of a problem.
I read very much and -dare I say it- I do not buy every book that I read.
The money I save by reading ebooks more than makes up for the price I pay for an ebook reader.
I have had an Hiebook,a Cybook and one of those old readable Sherman tanks: the Rocket ebook.

The problem with a lot of readers is that they offer lots of extra's that you don't need and will hardly ever use.
All I want is an ebook reader that can handle lots of formats like txt, doc, pdf, xhtml etc, that I can 'fill' fast and easy with the books I want to read and that doesn't give me a "battery low" message every 10 minutes.
The Iliad seems to offer all that.
And further more it is a Dutch product, same as myself :)

naughty boy High 5...:-)

You're really lucky though...I guess as a resident of the Netherlands you'll be one of the first to receive an Iliad. What's you VAT like? We have 16% here which is pretty heavy...it makes those 549€ into 635 or something without adding any value... :angry:
Maybe iRex will relent and stick to the price they gave Alexaner (549 incl. VAT, excl. Shipping) instead of 549 excl. everything like they told me.

Well..we should know soon.
Somehow i've got a nasty conflict of interests going right now...
I'd like it to be next week already because then we could hope for the release of the Iliad, but I've also got a holdiday right now (2 more wekks actually) and don#t want them to pass because after these holidays I'll be pretty busy preparing for my final exam I'm taking this summer...and then "real life" will start, looking fo a job and stuff like that...yuk... :kid:

I'm going with Sony for several reasons:

1. Familiarity, we all know Sony and they're generally reliable, even though it's owned by Phillips, IRex is still a new company

2. Price, I graduated from college last spring and the loans are coming in, 'nuff said.

3. Not made by damn dirty commies, I don't buy chinese products, period. I don't care how much they pretend to be capitalists, any success on their part still supports their government.

naughty boy High 5...:-)
<snip>
What's you VAT like? We have 16% here which is pretty heavy...
<big snip>
...and then "real life" will start, looking fo a job and stuff like that...yuk... :kid:

Yes, well erm.. anyway, the VAT or BTW as it is called out here is a nice and easy 19% for all electronic (consumer)goods and gadgets.
And about that real life, well you get used to it after a while.
Work is ok.
Really.
It is.
Yep.
I am going to have to lay down for a while now.

19% is not really nice...we'll probably get that high next year...

Oh, btw...you do realize that the "naugthy boy" comment was because of the "I don't buy all my books" comment? Just so you don't get the wrong idea...^^

3. Not made by damn dirty commies, I don't buy chinese products, period. I don't care how much they pretend to be capitalists, any success on their part still supports their government.

:scholar:
I knew a guy once who became a vegetarian for much of the same reason.
He didn't like animals that much but he really, really hated plants.
Your last argument won't play much of a role for most ebook readers and buyers I think.
The price is something else entirely.
For ebooks to finally get the breakthrough they deserve, ebook readers will have to become much cheaper than $500.
Most people would rather buy an Xbox 360 for that kind of money.
Sad, ignorant and narrowminded people ofcourse but nevertheless...

I want to go with the Iliad, mainly because of the openess and the touchscreen. I like to be able to underline, circle, etc. in my books, and I'm hoping I'll be able to do that.

19% is not really nice...we'll probably get that high next year...

Oh, btw...you do realize that the "naugthy boy" comment was because of the "I don't buy all my books" comment? Just so you don't get the wrong idea...^^

With my looks I hear that a lot.
No really I knew that. :tongue3:

Fact remains that I get most of my books from newsgroups and places like Gutenberg project.
(I still believe that Laurens Janszoon Koster invented the printing press. That German guy only had a better pr-agent. But that's an other discussion entirely)
Secretly I think that a lot of readers here have at least one or two books that they didn't buy in a store.
I also think that this is a major sellingpoint for ebook readers.

Difficult: voted Sony, but the Hanlin could be good as well. The more familiar Japanese brand name won even though I see its disadvantages. No doubt the iRex is technically the best machine, but the price is just too high - which is no surprise: owner Philips has a long tradition in introducing excellent and innovative electronic equipment and an equally long tradition in making them commercial failures. For those who want to spend their money on the iRex, do it as soon as possible. It won't be available for long, I'm afraid.

Kosst Amojan
would u wash your mouth, mister "graduated from college last spring", pls! :angry:

3. Not made by damn dirty commies, I don't buy chinese products, period. I don't care how much they pretend to be capitalists, any success on their part still supports their government.

There are pretty good reasons to believe that the more China becomes part of the global economy in terms of trade, capital flow, etc, the greater effect more liberal* ideas will have on their country. Hence you are supporting the current administration's existence more by not buying anything made in China.

Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that China is a great place at the moment or anything like that. It has a long way to go, but it will only be able to get there one step at a time. We have to do what we can to encourage it to take those steps.

-Drachasor

*I know some people might take me to task for using the term "liberal" here, since Communism is often associated with the left wing. However, China is more of an Oligarchy or Authoritarianism than it is anything approaching a real Communism (which probably couldn't exist with humans as they are now anyhow). If this talk about "liberal" doesn't make a lot of sense to you, dear reader, then you probably aren't an American (as I believe we use the term a fair bit differently than our friends overseas).

My personal favorite device is the Iliad. It is the perfect size for most Dover books (that's a publisher of cheap books on many subjects). Since I take a lot of math and science classes and since I have a bunch of Dover books on these topics, this is a big selling point. OCR is good at reading text right now, but it can't handle mathematical equations yet (as far as I know and I have looked around). As such I prefer the device that can display things in their native size page per page.

I also like the fact it has a touch screen. I hope Irex eventually releases enough information so you can code anything for the Iliad and not just readers. It would be pretty cool to have it double as a drawing/writing tablet for my laptop. I also thing there are a ton of other potential uses for a device with so many features, many things none of the other devices coming out could duplicate. If Irex changes their position on this (which would be wise, I think), then I might even code some things for it too.

Sony's device will probably be too limited and DRM-crippled. The Hanlin would be my second choice (it equals or exceed Sony in every area as best I see). However, none of the devices save the Iliad can display all the various ebook formats natively (such as PDFs).

-Drachasor

PS. I bought myself an 800 dollar duplexing scanner with a large ADF so that I can cut the binding off my books and get them in electric format. I've thought about offering to do that for other people, but as a small business I think I'd get sued--even though I think it falls within fair use, the legal precedent falls a bit on both sides of the issue.

TaKir - Wash my mouth? Hell I was being nice. :)

drachasor - I disagree but thank you for a rational criticism. I would agree with you but I've seenno serious pressure for a regime change there. The current government knows exactly what it is doing, by allowing Chinese companies to flourish they're just incresing their own tax base to keep their hold on power.

But this isn't a political forum, I remain doubtful about any high-tech products from China especially against two established and proven tech giants.

On the Irex, I am a bit concerned about its usefullness to me, I don't need or want any internet connectivity or a touchscreen (they need to have a second version). I am NOT going to pay $650 for an e-book reader, the added utility just isn't there.

That's why, despite the DRM, I'm going with the Sony. Most of the books I have currently are not DRM'd and those are probably a minority of what I'm going to use it for. I work for a DC think tank and mostly what I want to use it for is academic studies, papers, reports, etc. All of that is not DRM'd and mostly PDF (or easily convertable to PDF or Sony's format).

So this whole debate over specs is useless to me and I'm sure to several of you. It all depends what you're going to use it for. Me, being a political junkie, where it's from it important and of course price is also.

TaKir - Wash my mouth? Hell I was being nice. :)

drachasor - I disagree but thank you for a rational criticism. I would agree with you but I've seenno serious pressure for a regime change there. The current government knows exactly what it is doing, by allowing Chinese companies to flourish they're just incresing their own tax base to keep their hold on power.


Of course. Change will happen because the future leaders of China are being exposed to more liberal views. Change will take time because the old guard will have to die off (or otherwise lose power).

*BEGIN OT*

About the Chinese issue...I think we "liberalist Capitalists" have to be very careful there...we've had and still have our share of "dirty" leadership.
I've never been to china, so I don't know what it's likw there...but the chinese people I know here in Germany and the ones I know over the internet are all just...well...people very much like us here...and communism or whatever the Chinese are doing at the moment isn't worse in theory than our federal/liberal/whatever system is...practical translation is always the issue...and the chinese seem to be improving there...at least a bit...
What really scares me though is the Theocracy stuff going on in this Century (it's the 21st after all!!!)
Some people (and I'm not talking only Iraq here...) just need to realize that religion and politics don't mix. Crusaders vs. Holy Warriors of the Jihad is not something I want to see happening in my lifetime. In the dark middle-ages...ok...but not today...we have so many wonderful gadgets to look forward to...

*END OT*

Well, if we are going to skip the hanlin readers just because its made by a Chinese company in China, then heck, you can start throwing out most of the notebooks we use, 'cos a good lot of them, if not their parts are from China. Most if not all the products in Walmart come from China. This Averatec notebook I bought in US is from China. The US government is ordering a whole suite of lenovo notebooks form China. Are they in cahoots with communism now? :gasp:

IBM Thinkpads were made by lenovo for awhile before Lenovo bought over it. So IBM is a communism extension as well?

Gosh. How much more paranoid can we get?

Get a gripe on reality. The cold war ended. Long time ago. The Chinese government, like any other governments in the whole whole, including the republicans and democrats in US, all want to stay in power. Whether they are doing it honestly believing that they are doing their best for their country or for their self-interest is a different thing altogether.

Sure, communism do not have a good name, and was responsible for quite a bit of harm over the couple of decades, but the last I check, its a Republican President who declared war on a country over WMD only to admit later that they were unsure or that there were no WMDs. So who's the bad guy really?

Let's focus on the various ereaders for their own technological merits and suitability as an ereader rather than some far-fetched complicated implications. Peace. :)

I voted for the Sony.

The Iliad whilst technically impressive, is for my needs, too feature rich. I don't need wifi, touch screen etc. I want something cheaper on which to read novels a book replacement if you will. Too many features has lead to a high price that I can't justify for my needs.

Hanlin V2. I don't really have any specific objections to this device. I'd like to see one in person. Its feature set is reasonable and doesn't add too much that I won't use. My political position doesn't prevent me from showing interest in a Chinese device. I just can't pin down what it is that doesn't inspire me to go out and buy one.

Sony. The one I chose. This is their second jaunt into the e-ink arena, which should mean they know where they went wrong and are willing to make the effort to improve. They are going to support the device with a content system. This is possibly the most important thing to me. DRM an evil of the modern world is to be expected but good DRM should never affect the user. In fact you shouldn't be aware of it. In the same way I don't notice the DRM on my iPod I don't expect to notice the DRM on my book reader. The convenience of a content system will allow 24 hour book shopping and getting to the end of a series of books in the middle of the night won't leave me annoyed that I can't get to a book shop before the weekend to either get something else to read or to buy the next installment. I like the physical design. It's clearly a book replacement device. Concentrating on features around the reading of novels. I don't read tech documents and it's been a few years since I was in college so search and annotation are redundant features as far as I'm concerned.

If the content pricing is right and the DRM transparent then I can see Sony doing very well out of this generation of readers.

i voted for hanlin.

v2 seems to offer the best balance between features and price.

Could you pls explain me more details about the features and price?
Hanlin V2 is 349USD which is the same to Sony.

i voted for hanlin.

v2 seems to offer the best balance between features and price.

well...the Hanlin has/will have a slave display for data-input.
It also contains some PDA apps (like a caldender) right out of the box and possibly it natively understands more file-formats than the Sony (this is just a guess, Sony isn#t too precise about their file-format support...)

The Hanlin V2 also provides/will provide an SDK so that 3rd parties can easily create new software...this is somehting i don't see happening fo the Sony. Hackers will probably manage to create firmaware hacks and stuff fo the Reader, but it's input options are very limited, so the chances of useful apps are limited too.

There is more, but I'm too lazy to remember right now...will anyone help me out?

That pretty much sums it up. Or you can always check http://www.mobileread.com/eink/ for a quick overview how the next e-book devices compare to each other.

I vote for the iRex because I am in desperate need of a bigger screen. Probably unlike most other readers I intend to read technical e-books on my next reader device. Obviously the bigger the screen here the better.

If I do actually buy one f these it would be the Iliad -- I'd mostly be using it for reading scientific papers from PDF files, and from experiment/experience 800x600 just isn't enough resolution for the typical font size (10 point for most text) if one wants to read a whole page at a time. 1024x768 on my Tablet PC is fine, however, and the Iliad has that resolution (if a smaller diagonal, but I'm short-sighted anyway...).

If I do actually buy one f these it would be the Iliad -- I'd mostly be using it for reading scientific papers from PDF files, and from experiment/experience 800x600 just isn't enough resolution for the typical font size.
Ditto. My concern however is the limited support for PDF files. Especially when you take scientific documents, a proper formatting is often important, if not obligatory. PDF capabilities of the iLiad appear to be more of a rudimentary kind; with bad luck you won't have a better experience on the 1024x768 screen than on the smaller Sony Reader screen.

Btw, I voted for Sony Reader because I cannot afford the iLiad.

I voted for the Hanlin V2. Although, I have not heard a date for release in the states yet. I have never read an ebook, but I am VERY interested in finding a device that will be able to fit my needs. I want to download books and read them. Why must they have all the extras? Most of the books that I have looked at are in PDF format, so I am looking for a device that supports that. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated!!!

I voted for the Sony Reader, which I find more elegant overall than the iLiad. The iLiad reminds me of the Newton: larger and more feature-rich. The Reader reminds me of the PalmPilot: smaller, cheaper, more practical for mainstream usage patterns. And I like the fact that the Reader has a cover.

I much prefer its paperback size to something larger that's still not fully A4. I am impressed by the iLiad and wish iRex well, but I'm leery about spending $700 on an unestablished product from an unestablished company whose fate is probably tied to their one product's success or failure. A touchscreen and WiFi would be nice, but not at twice the price. And I still suspect (but hopefully Henrique will disprove) that the iLiad's WiFi implementation is limited to iRex's iDS proxy.

But I'm still holding out for an unequivocal list of which formats Sony supports natively and through conversion. HTML, which was mentioned early on by journalists at CES, hasn't been mentioned in since; and if it's not supported, as it is with the iLiad, the Reader might be a false economy after all.

The forum has been a bit quiet these past few days, so I thought I'd put up this poll and see whether I can get a few more people to vote than on the Piracy/ebook Poll... :scholar:

Please post your reasons and if you choose option 4 then give us an idea what you're waiting for.

Well, I'm waiting on an Iliad 'cause their web site won't sell it to me yet.

The local library has e-books in a DRMd .pdf format and in the MobiPocket formate. Sony's 'we are the only authorized place you can get a book' won't cut it with me, not when the library has 5k+ books available to download, most still within copyright (ie, not availble on Project G anytime soon). The Iliad seems on the verge of making the announcement that MobiPocket is a supported format, so for me the decision is a no brainer - higher price now, cheaper over the long run.

Reason for getting an e-book reader is I travel extensively for work and read a lot during those trips. Being able to take fewer books on a trip (last trip I read 14 or 15) would be a relief for both me and the luggage. I've used the Palm for reading, but it is a lot further from an ideal solution than the new generation of devices coming out.

...not when the library has 5k+ books available to download....

Is that a link you can post? :D

Is that a link you can post? :D

www.cpl.org
Go to e-media from the home page.

Excellent! Thanks!