Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Reasons to get an E-Reader

A Picture of a eBookImage via Wikipedia
Lately, my attention has been focused on E-readers. The reasons I'm pining for one are:
  1. I love books, and having lost a small collection of them a few years ago, I'm not hard pinned to invest money building a new one; so having a e-reader makes perfect sense as it would be hard to lose your collection as you can take it with you anywhere you go. 
  2. The fact what you can have everything you own with you at all times is a given.
  3. I read a bit of technical and reference books and most of the time I need my hands elsewhere and would require 2-3 books at a time. An e-reader cuts down on the hassle and clutter.
  4. I tend to read 3-4 leisure books at the same time and couldn't possibly carry all of them with me at all times.
  5. Being able to look down and trounce people who relegate e-readers as a fad and how they'll never take place of physical books. (Your opinions don't count you dinosaurs!)
Those are the "Why's" and "I wanna's." When it to comes to the question of selecting one, there are a slew of options. I had been waiting for the 1st and 2nd generation readers to pass as the response times were sluggish when turning pages, not to mention the price.

At present the prices have dropped, with brand name devices running around € 100 to over mid € 200. The only contention being that most of them are locked into their proprietary makers' e-book stores and formats. Some offer common existent formats such as .txt, .pdf etc but their rendering is either slow or lacking, and the much talked about ePub format is currently in the discussion phase. When amalgamated, it will enable an universal format for nearly all publishers and manufacturers thus enabling near similar reproduction on every device and opening up libraries to all users.

I will hopefully be delving into the details of specific e-readers soon enough. Till then hold your noses people.
Enhanced by Zemanta

No comments: