Quote:
Originally Posted by BHastings175
Thank You,
Why do you say the Sony as opposed to the nook/kindle?
I have thought about the iPad - but if I was going to use an LCD screen then I would just use my laptop, and I hate reading on my laptop.
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I mentioned the 950, rather than other options, because of the 7" screen. It actually makes a big difference with PDFs.
From a screen-size point of view, the Kindle DX would have been a better option, but it has no touch-screen, which makes annotations cumbersome.
Don't get me wrong - the 950 is far from perfect. If you read PDFs in portrait, you need pretty good eyes, as the font size tends often to be borderline-acceptable. But you can use it in landscape mode, displaying a third of a page at the time and read fairly comfortably. The touch screen is responsive. The annotations can be viewed on SONY's software on your PC, or exported to RTF - but with limitations. Highlighting will export only a small number of characters (can't recall the exact number) from copyrighted material. Handwritten annotations will be exported to an image file including the page you annotated - those images pasted in the same RTF. Both mark date, document and page.
As far as I have seen, it's the best eink can offer for PDFs and annotations. there are some new, larger eink devices, such as the ONYX and Pocketbook 903, but they are still plagued with software glitches, poor PDF handling and not always easily available in the US, but you might want to consider those nonetheless
But it's eink. No fast scrolling through the document or peeking at tables in the back of the document.
In contrast, an iPad offers those features. You can easily and fluidly scroll through documents, the screen is obviously larger and the zooming less cumbersome and you have applications that will allow for storing annotations embedded in a PDF. But short battery life, weight and the discomfort of reading on LCD are there.
Frankly, I tried various options, extensively, and settled for an iPad, with a stylus and iAnnotate. But I can understand why someone would not want to read on LCD. I find eink more comfortable, but with brightness set to low levels, I can stand an LCD more than I can stand the slowness of eink.
Of course, some of it depends on WHAT you read. If seeing a page in full matters to you, an iPad would be best. If you read PDFs that are mostly text (as opposed to tables and figures) and tend to read linearly (without flipping pages a lot) then eink might do.