Quote:
Originally Posted by Katti's Cat
One piece of advice though: stop looking and take the plunge. There will always be a newer, better reader coming out. If you wait for the perfect reader you'll never get one.
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+1 to those wise words.
In my experience, choosing an ereader is much like trying to pick a wife or husband - there are a great many candidates but none of them are perfect.
You have to be a little flexible and accepting about their strengths and weaknesses or you'll never make a choice. And then you'll probably just fall in love with one ereader, for no particularly logical reason...
One of the ways that you can narrow the field down a bit is to consider portability. Do you really want to carry it around a lot, or will it mostly be used at home for instance? The smallest readers (such as an iTouch) are the easiest to carry, so will have the highest chance that you'll actually have it in your pocket for casual reading wherever you are. If you wear coats with large pockets, or carry a handbag, then the mid-sized ones are fine. But if you carry a briefcase, or perhaps read mostly at home or in a classroom or office situation, then a small netbook is very hard to beat.
Netbooks are a lot more versatile than most of the others. They can run a wide range of reader software and can therefore read multiple formats. For instance, you can run the Kindle software, Adobe Digital Edition, Stanza, and a stack of others. They are also the most likely to do a good job displaying PDFs for instance, where the extra screen size can make a big difference when you're dealing with certain types of document, such as technical diagrams and detailed scanned images. These can be a bit awkward on some readers, as can magazines or web pages. However, their bigger size and weight can also make netbooks less desirable for some.
Plus you can do a lot of other things on a netbook, and they're excellent for storing, cataloguing and searching your growing library. I have both E-ink reader and backlit screens and find them both fine to read - in fact I rather prefer backlit - but others love E-ink displays. So finding out if you're firmly in one camp or another might help too. (My solution is to have more than one device and use accordingly...
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But the bottom line is - as Katti's Cat says - there is always a better one just down the track. There are a heap of tablet/slate style readers expected out in the next year or so and they are sure to attract a lot of fans.
Good luck with your choice, and as soon as you've bought one then start saving for the next one!
Cheers,
Chris