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Personally, I did not like the Astak when I tried it. It never seemed to remember my place in the book and when I reopened a book it would be several pages behind where it should have been.
I had a Sony and was very happy with it. I have a Kindle now (wanted the dictionary and text to speech features) and am very happy with it as well. Unless you need a specific feature only available on one brand, I honestly think they are all pretty much the same. The one thing I miss about the Sony is the collections, it was so handy to organize the books in Calibre using tags and have that group the books into sets. I miss that on the Kindle.
As far as free books, there are tons of sites like Feedbooks, Manybooks, this forum and others. If you are looking for free 'modern' books, then here are some options:
- Smashwords (mostly self-published books, some free, some not. Quality will vary)
- Sony and Amazon (they tend to run the same promotions; books free on one site often are on the other)
- The public library (mine stocks mostly romance in ebooks, but sometimes I will hit the motherload---they just got all the Grishams for example)
If I did not need the dictionary and text to speech features, I would probably recommend the Sony over the Kindle because you can buy from more stores. I could read library books, books from Kobo and epubs from Fictionwise without liberating/converting when I had the Sony. And I liked the collections. I do love my Kindle too, but the only reason I upgraded was because because I need the extra features it has.
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