I made a
blog post a while back about this. The main parts:
Issues to consider:
- e-Ink vs LCD screen (e-ink looks like paper but is slower, and black&white only; LCD can have color, but eats battery life; non-backlit LCD screens are much cheaper, but B&W only.)
- Wifi or not
- Allows annotations or not
- Built-in dictionary or not
- Filetype support (ebooks come in a handful of popular, easy-to-find formats, and several dozen obscure ones. And some readers support user docs in Word or RTF or TXT format; some don't.)
- PDF support: reflow, zoom, something else
- DRM support (Digital Rights Management, software that locks your ebook to a particular device)
- folder support (do the files show up in folders, like on a computer, or does the managing software sort them in some other way?)
- Firmware glitchiness/customer support
- Stylus vs Keyboard, if it has an input option
- Screen size: 5", 6" (which is most common), 8"+. (Larger costs more. A lot more.)
- Battery life
- SD Card support
- Open-source firmware options--ability to play sudoku, have a clock, change fonts onscreen, etc.
- Price ($150-500 mainly, and it goes up from there. We're still waiting on the under $100 basic ebook reader.)
Issues that some people care about, but I never have:
- Acessories (covers, cases, AC adapter, headphones)
- MP3 ability (theoretically for audiobooks)
- Color options (Kindle is white only. Sony Readers come in about 4 colors. Astak readers have 6. Some brands have 2 or 3.)
- Dedicated online bookstore
- Probably several other things I don't think of because I don't care about them *and* they don't get discussed much. (While I don't personally care about wifi, I know it's important to a lot of people because it gets mentioned. If battery size is important to anyone, I haven't noticed.)
Issues that we wish were relevant, but aren't:
- Warranty details (they range from "bad" to "useless")
- Repair options (ditto)
- Manuals & info about any uses other than "click here to pay for & install your book on the device" (All the user manuals are lousy.)
- Ergonomics (there was a great ergonomic ebook reader 10 years ago. Still available. It reads two very obscure filetypes and weighs a pound and a half. Since then, everything's small and flat and about equally badly designed.)
- User-adjustable software (it's not)
- User interface (they range from "mediocre" to "awful;" apparently, it didn't occur to any of the sofware designers that if you could put 1500 ebooks on a card, you'd want a way to sort them other than alphabetically.)
- Really *good* PDF support. (Not going to happen, ever; PDF was created as a print-ready format, and they're made in too many different ways for any viewer to ever be able to display them all well.)