Favourite e-reader and why?

[EowynCarter]

Well, my favorite so far the cybook opus. Way more ergonomics than gen3.

As to rest of the reader, i've never had the opportunty to use them, so i'll have a hard time comparing.

[Ea]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I guess I must have been unlucky, then. Terry Pratchett, Stephen King, Dan Brown - none of them available, to name but three authors I've tried.

Ah, I see. Aparts from books taht they didn't have in kindel version at all, it's only been one, perhaps two books that I couldn't find. I really like the sample download option - feels almost like buying the book and it doesn't cost me anything. Most times it has turned out I didn't want the book anyway. It's definitely cut down on my impulse buys.

[LDBoblo]

Originally Posted by astra

I think it is the first time I hear frustration from you, HarryT. You actually have feelings similar to an average Joe ebook reader
You always sound like: Why do you care? There are so many free classics out there. Why don't you read them instead of hunting for books you cannot buy? etc. You never really worded it like that but that was my impression of reading between lines of your posts.
Please, don't get me wrong, I am not gloating or anything, but I am surprised.

Next thing you know, I'll start saying positive things about an ebook reader. Mighty changes.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by astra

I think it is the first time I hear frustration from you, HarryT. You actually have feelings similar to an average Joe ebook reader
You always sound like: Why do you care? There are so many free classics out there. Why don't you read them instead of hunting for books you cannot buy? etc. You never really worded it like that but that was my impression of reading between lines of your posts.
Please, don't get me wrong, I am not gloating or anything, but I am surprised.

To be honest with you, astra - yes, the Kindle has disappointed me. Not the machine itself (which is very nice), but the fact that its primary selling point is the easy wireless purchase of books, and, basically, every single blooming book that I've wanted to buy has been geographically restricted!

Amazon has announced the setting up of a UK bookstore, so hopefully that will aleviate the problem, but at present, owning an international Kindle is a fraustrating experience when it comes to buying "bestsellers". If that's your desire, there are many better devices available at present.

[Ea]

Originally Posted by HarryT

To be honest with you, astra - yes, the Kindle has disappointed me. Not the machine itself (which is very nice), but the fact that its primary selling point is the easy wireless purchase of books, and, basically, every single blooming book that I've wanted to buy has been geographically restricted!

Amazon has announced the setting up of a UK bookstore, so hopefully that will aleviate the problem, but at present, owning an international Kindle is a fraustrating experience when it comes to buying "bestsellers". If that's your desire, there are many better devices available at present.

I hear you. When I bought it I didn't buy it for buying books, and I'm typically not buying bestsellers, but even so I have looked up books and have disappointed by the prices - the 'international' prices aren't all that much of a bargain.

Also, I don't like the buying process. I've bought one book, and after clicking 'buy' on the Kindle, I expected to get a confirm page with a price stated, but no, I had just bought it. There was a 'regret' option, but still... I know it's one-click buy and so on, but it's still on the verge of sneaky IMO.

However, the devcie is great, and my best so far, for fiction.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Jack Tingle

I can turn the backlight up to 11 and read for a very short time in bright sunlight. That way lies madness. I bought a jetBook for that, instead.

What I use is a Tapwave Zodiac 2, which is a PDA running Palm OS 5.26. Tapwave went belly up in 2005, but I have several so can deal with hardware failure.

The Zodiac was intended to be a combo PDA and handheld gaming device, so it has a 320x480 color screen driven by an ATI graphics chip with 8MB of onboard RAM and 2D acceleration, Yamaha stereo sound with actual (tiny) stereo speakers on the device, Bluetooth, and 128MB of RAM. The best feature from my perspective is two SD card slots, one of which is SDIO. I have a 2GB SD card in each, but can upgrade to 4GB (non-SDHC) if need be.

About half of the Zodiac's purpose in life it to be an ebook reader, and I have about 3,500 volumes on the device. About 3,200 are HTML converted to the format used by Plucker, an open source offline HTML reader for Palm OS devices. Among other things, I have the complete Baen Free Library converted for Plucker. But I also have several hundred Mobipocket volumes, mostly courtesy of the fine folks at MR, and some stuff in eReader format, as well as PDF files I view with the open source PalmPDF application. I can handle Palm Doc files, zTXT files, plain ASCII text files, and Word documents and RTF files via the open source PalmFiction application. (PF strips the formatting on the Word/RTF files and displays the text as plain text.)

It's handy because I can read just about anything on it. The problem is remembering which book is in which format, read by which viewer. Since I convert HTML to Plucker by preference, or get Mobipocket format, others are there because it was the only way to get them, so keeping tings straight isn't as bad as it might be.

I can also turn the backlight all the way off, which makes it readable out of doors.

The biggest wins for me are color support and the fact that I can do many other things besides view ebooks. I'd like a bigger screen, but can deal with what I have.
______
Dennis