The Sword and Laser discussion
E-Reader Smackdown!
I'm also seriously considering purchasing a nook now. I refuse to support Amazon, so Kindle isn't even in the running.
I've loved my Kindle, first gen. With the prices dropping, maybe I'll finally get the new one. My original one is starting to be picky about the way I set it when it's charging.
there is a pretty good discussion concerning the e-book readers here. The S&L group has a lot of opinions ;) link: http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/3...
I have a nook and enjoy it quite a bit. I haven't used a kindle before, but I would advise looking at b&n's ebook selection. While they say they have more total ebooks, I've found quite a number are not available and are only on kindle, speaking strictly sword and lazer stuff here. (Bright of the Sky is one example) Sadly Amazon uses a DRM that is rather complicated to break (and illegal). So, while I enjoy my nook and would highly recommend it, just make sure it has books you would actually want to read available.
Hopefully in the future the ebook market will get rid of drm and adopt just one standard that can be used on all readers.
A plus of the nook is that it does support epub and can use overdrive.com to checkout ebooks from your library if they use the service.
Hmmm, very interesting. Then again, maybe b&n'll support adobe epub in their ipad app.
I'm using a Kobo and it's pretty good. Nice and small and simple to use, but the sci/fi back catalogue in its store is only OK. There are some huge holes as well. The other day I decided to finally jump into the franchise novel world and read some old Star Wars Expanded Universe books. I'm told that the Thrawn trilogy is pretty good, but when I looked, none of them were available on kobo.My other e-reader option is my iPad, but I'm in Canada and Apple hasn't worked out its licensing deal with Canadian publishers yet, so the iBookstore has nothing in it but out-of-copyright works.
For those with access to the whole iBook catalogue, how is it for older Sci/Fi?
I chose the Nook primarily because it uses standard formats. The Kindle uses a proprietary format and non-Kindle books have to be converted to read on it. Now, people who own Kindles say that it isn't a big deal, but I just didn't want to go through an extra step if I was going to download a story or book from another site. I did not want an iPad for reading because of the weight and the LED (or LCD) screen. It really looks like a fabulous product and I'd love to have one someday, but it's expensive and I just don't think I'd be able to read as easily on it.
I'd recommend test-driving the various devices. You can try out the Nook at Barnes & Noble or Best Buy. Target now has the Kindle. You can try the Sony Reader at Borders or Best Buy. I'd recommend the Apple Store for test-driving the iPad.
I just finished reading my first e-book, The Passage on my Nook and I loved how much easier it was to read an 800+ page book on the reader than in hardback. I really liked where the page turn buttons were located. It was a very comfortable experience.
The sf book selection in the Apple store in the US definitely isn't as good as kindle or b&n.
Tamahome wrote: "The sf book selection in the Apple store in the US definitely isn't as good as kindle or b&n."However, you can download a B&N reader app to the iPad so you do have access to B&N e-books. They're just not in that slick iBooks format.
I have b&n reader, kindle app, kobo, iceberg (peter f hamilton app) and stanza all installed. Stanza can pinch the font size. :)How's the Nook beta web browser? That works over 3g right? Ever try to post here on it?
am I the only person in the world who LOVES reading ebooks on my iphone? I LOVE Stanza, and it takes any format. I'm just sayin. Any format. I also buy lots of Kindle books and read them on my iphone too. One of the main reasons I do not have an iPad yet is that I cannot imagine loving it more as an ebook reader than my dear little iPhone. I think I have read probably 200 books, big and small on it- these days if someone gives me a paper book, I go find an e version and read that instead. I think the best thing I have ever heard anyone else say about readin on the iphone is that it's ok in a pinch (ha ha pun intended)- but I LOVE IT. Ok, I'm weird. I just outed myself on the internets.
Taueret wrote: "am I the only person in the world who LOVES reading ebooks on my iphone? I LOVE Stanza, and it takes any format ..."I read on Stanza too. I have not tried uploading anything yet, I have only read stuff off of their bookshop. If I ever had a reason to buy the new iphone, it would be for the screen to read books.
I have just downloaded the marvel app, so I will have to see how it compares.
so basically the main difference is which formats they each supportThe UI between devices i dont hear anyone say too much about im actually going to go play with the NOOK later today and Target has the kindle maybe i will work my way there and see what its about
Battery life anyone?
The nook has a color touchscreen on the bottom.
I have the Sony Pocket edition, and while I do enjoy reading on it, I do have one issue.The screen refresh is slooow.
Given the small size of the screen, I can read the page almost as fast as it refreshes, so it takes me longer to read a book on the ereader than it would to read the dead tree version.
I have the Sony Pocket Reader PRS-300, and I'm pretty happy with it. The refresh is definitely fast enough for me. I'm a slower reader, and I use the smallest font. The only delay that I really notice a lot is when it opens a book for the first time.
I really like the Kindle, and almost all books I buy are for it. The Kindle app is also good on my iPhone -- and I was surprised that I could read a book on it with no trouble. I also use Stanza on the phone. The iPad (which I steal from my wife now and then) is a **great** way to read technical books that do not work well on the Kindle. I'm a programmer and buy more than a few programming books from Amazon, and they are very hard to read on the regular Kindle but are great on the iPad's Kindle app. Very easy to read, code doesn't get smushed off to the side, illustrations are clear. Considering the cost of the iPad, is it worth it? Hmmm. Yep. I can carry all my reference books with me to work. Of course, since it is my wife's I actually can't do that. Darn!!!
I like my iPad, for the reason that I can install multiple apps.
This is good for me because in Australia there are a lot of books that you can not purchase from Kindle and the others. By having the flexibility of different stores, I am more likely able to find the book I do want.
This is good for me because in Australia there are a lot of books that you can not purchase from Kindle and the others. By having the flexibility of different stores, I am more likely able to find the book I do want.
Paul wrote: "I really like the Kindle, and almost all books I buy are for it. The Kindle app is also good on my iPhone -- and I was surprised that I could read a book on it with no trouble. I also use Stanza on..."AH finally a reason to get an iPad ;-). I LOVE my iPhone and use it for reading ebooks all the time, but I don't like technical books/text books in e-format. Something about not being able to dogear the pages, flip back and forth until I understand something, etc etc. But if I could read them on the iPad (which I really WANT but I feel unfaithful to my iPhone) than that makes it okay. muahaha
I'm debating whether I'll be buying a Nook or an IPhone4. I haven't been much of a fan of ebooks but am starting to come around to the idea of being able to carry multiple books and to shop for a book on the fly. Also to be able to share books on the Nook. Lots to think about.
For Chilimac--just remember that it is much harder to make a phone call on a Nook. (I am very patiently waiting for the Apple Store to call and tell me an iPhone 4 has come in for me).And for Taueret -- just double checked the iPad with "ASP.NET and Ajax" and "CSS: the Missing Manual" -- the code reads great in landscape mode -- no forced line breaks, and the screen shots are clear and easy to read.
I came into some money and just bought a Kindle. I though digital books were priced lower than print. About half of the books are MORE than the cost of paperbacks! I don't get it. I am so dissapointed. $190 for the machine and no discount and no sharing or trading the books. I will use it for really long books I suppose.
I find with my Nook that new releases that are available only in hardback are priced far less than the hardback, usually $9.99 to $12.99. Books that are available in trade paperback (the ones that cost $12.99 to $15.99) are about the same price as new releases. Books that are available in in mass-market paperback are priced about the same as the mass-market paperback.Now, you can get e-books at a much lower cost, or free. Baen Free Library ( http://www.baen.com/library/ ) has a gazillion free books available. I don't know if you can upload them to a Kindle, but they work with the Nook, the Sony Reader, and any other reader that uses an epub format. With any of the readers that use epub or pdf formats, you can check books out from many libraries' websites as well. However, I don't think this works with the Kindle though.
Paul wrote: "Taueret -- just double checked the iPad with "ASP.NET and Ajax" and "CSS: the Missing Manual" -- the code reads great in landscape mode -- no forced line breaks, and the screen shots are clear and easy to read. ..."that is great news, thanks. That's the kind of thing that sells me on an iPad (and I want to believe ;-)). I am an addict for O'Reilly's ebook sales- excited to finally be able to read some of them properly.
Robert Sawyer had a good blog post about proper justifying in ereaders, and he picks on The Nook for an example:http://www.sfwriter.com/2010/02/b-noo...
Tamahome wrote: "Robert Sawyer had a good blog post about proper justifying in ereaders, and he picks on The Nook for an example:http://www.sfwriter.com/2010/02/b-noo..."
What's he smokin'? I hadn't noticed any jusification issues with my Nook, so I pulled it out and looked at a few of the books. Books that are downloaded for the Nook from Barnes & Noble seem to be fully justified, just like paper books. However, it's not even noticeable and I haven't seen anything as egregious as what Sawyer points out in his article. Furthermore, any epub or pdf books/stories downloaded from other sources are justified in whichever way the document is formatted. I've read three books on my Nook and am currently reading two. I've looked at quite a few others. They all look like paper books.
They might have improved things with a software update. Don't forget that these books are scanned in from paper, pre-justified, and then re-wrapped according to the font size. I'm noticing random hypens in words that shouldn't be there, even in iBooks.
Interesting usability study regarding iPad, Kindle, dead tree versions, and computers (this one is specifically about reading speed but other studies are linked): http://www.useit.com/alertbox/ipad-ki...Hat tip to the gdgt discussion http://gdgt.com/discuss/jakob-nielsen...
Tamahome wrote: "They might have improved things with a software update. Don't forget that these books are scanned in from paper, pre-justified, and then re-wrapped according to the font size. I'm noticing random..."yeah, my official Kindle version of The Passage, purchased from Amazon legally and everything was full of weird justification and hyphenation errors.
My brand spanking new Kindle broke in my luggage yesterday on my first trip! Never got to read anything other than the riveting owner's manual. Amazon has fantastic customer service! They offered to replace, next day air no charge, but I got a refund. Real books never break in your luggage, and you can share them. I really wanted to like the Kindle but it's too expensive and fragile.But Amazon has great customer service!
But, John, think how much you would be helping the economy...I do notice that it is amazingly easy to push that little "buy" button.
I did it, I bought the Nook. To bad "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" isn't an ebook yet.
Chilimac wrote: "I did it, I bought the Nook. To bad "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" isn't an ebook yet."You are going to love the Nook. I won't be reading The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress simply because it isn't available as an e-book.
Now Borders has an e-reader (made by Kobo?). Borders sells like 4 different e-readers, their own, 2 sony ones, and a libre one.
After much research, I notice that readers who dislike ereaders are not people who have one. Most readers who have one, like it. I am going to give it another try.
So far I like my Nook but I am not in love with the e-reading experience. The single biggest issue for me is not knowing how many pages are left in a chapter. When I start reading a physical book I like to place my bookmark at the start of the next chapter so I know how far I have to go. With an e-book I have no idea. Even if I what page the next chapter starts on it doesn't help because the page I am reading could actually be 3 pages on the e-reader.
Chilimac wrote: "The single biggest issue for me is not knowing how many pages are left in a chapter."On the Kindle if you look at the timeline at the bottom some of the dots will be bolded. Sometimes these co-incide with chapters, other times they are "sections". You can use the 5-way cursor thing to press left and right and jump to those bolded dots.
I do agree with you though, it would be nice, especially for coordinating a reading group with friend who are still reading paper books, to have chapter designation on the ebooks. Or some way to translate page xx on the book to location xxx on the ebook.
@Tom: I'm glad to hear I'm not the only person that feels this way. I wouldn't think it would be that hard to put something like a chapter page indication at the bottom of the page like "pg 5 of 20" or something like that. Maybe the chapter title on top.
I recently bought a Sony PRS-600 and had some issues with it freezing up, and was annoyed with the glare, so I bought a Nook and compared the two side by side. I thought I'd just share my thoughts with you guys since I wrote most of this as an email to an interested friend. I am really a dead-tree book kind of guy, but there are some documents and books I'd rather read electronically, and thus the recent purchase. I tried a Kindle 2 last year, but ended up sending it back because I wasn't happy with it. (I'm picky with my books.)Right off the bat, the contrast on the Nook is pretty impressive. The Sony PRS-600 looks like an old school (green) LCD next to it. I thought the Sony screen was great until I had them side by side. There is a lot more glare on the Sony in a well-lit room, and I could see my reflection in it, whereas the Nook only showed a vague outline of my head in the reflection, and the most important part is that the text was clear at almost any angle, whereas the Sony struggles with angling the glare out. The Sony has the pan and zoom for pdfs, which is nice, but that is a software update that B&N would be stupid not to be working on. The Nook needs a landscape mode too. The OS the Nook uses is good, and the mini touch screen is better than I expected. It's using a simple version of the Android OS, and it feels pretty decent, although it's not responsive like the iOS. It reminds me of my first impression of the Droid. Slow, as in lag in response to finger gestures, but not a deal-breaker. Web browsing is much better than the Kindle, navigating kind of Nintendo DS style, but not nearly as useful as Opera on the DS, but B&N is calling it a beta. It would be usable in a pinch. The user has access to the battery, SIM card, and MicroSD, although it's a little odd unsnapping the back panel to get at it. I think someone could easily break it if they weren't being careful taking it off.
Sony has the Nook beat in the pdf viewing department, since you can zoom in and pan around, which is one of my original reasons for buying it. There are a couple of pdf documents that I have that are completely useless on the Nook. Even Sony needs one more zoom level to really read it properly, but it works. The touch interface is nice on the Sony, but it's a resistive screen, so the stylus is probably a good idea. The touch screen on the Nook is capacitive (I think), so the finger gestures work pretty well, and the resolution is good. I think the Nook interface is almost like mixing Amazon's horrible one with Sony's decent one. B&N still copied Amazon too much in this regard, relying on sorting and searching rather than giving the ability to organize into folders. I hate this, because I like to put stupid notes and manuals or whatever on there. There's nothing that I can see that will let you create folders and drop documents into. The Nook puts the stuff not downloaded from their site into a "My Documents" folder to separate it from the B&N purchases. Sony lets you organize into "collections," but you have to do all your organizing on the desktop app and then sync it with the device. There is no on-the-fly organizing on either device beyond sorting lists.
I bought one cheap book from each store I was interested in: Borders, Sony eBooks, Barnes and Noble, and tried to load them all on each other's devices. This was interesting, since I thought the Sony would win this compatibility contest due to my experience with the Playstation 3, but the Nook actually has the advantage here due to its own bookstore. The Nook is recognized by Adobe's Digital Editions software (like iTunes for books), so it will decrypt and load books you buy at Borders and Sony onto the Nook no problem, and it will do the same for the PRS-600. The Nook also reads B&N books, of course, but Adobe doesn't manage B&N DRM like it does for Sony and Borders (I don't even know if Borders has DRM, it's kind of cool how it doesn't seem locked down), so the Sony reader can't use the B&N eBooks (yet). FYI, neither device can read Amazon's format, and the Kindle doesn't read ePub, so the test wouldn't work with Amazon. I can't believe that the Nook doesn't read plain text. They better fix that. The pdf viewing is barely passable on the Nook, but I like the device more than the Sony because it just seems like a better, more refined experience even though Sony has been doing it for several years now. For $170, Sony doesn't even give you WiFi. It does pdfs better than the Nook, but it is still inconvenient reading pdfs on a small screen like that. At least the great contrast on the Nook makes the tiny text easier to read, with a lot less glare.
If now I've looked at some of the best offerings (Kindle, Nook, Sony), I guess the state of ereaders, in general, is that they still have issues, but I'm going to keep the Nook because I have had more fun using it than any of the other two readers I've used. I can also shop around the ebook stores to find the best ebook price for something and use it on the Nook. If the Sony reader hadn't locked up on me several times within my first few days of using it, I probably wouldn't have considered the Nook, but now I'm glad it did.
Thanks for reading. After the Heinlein book (I'm doing that one in Audible format this time), I can't wait to download the next one!
The Nook & BN ereader blog gives away a free ebook every friday.http://bookclubs.barnesandnoble.com/t...
For the Kindle owners out there....how is the text to speech feature. Does the voice reading to you sound like a computer or has more like an audio book sound to you.
Lekeshua wrote: "For the Kindle owners out there....how is the text to speech feature. Does the voice reading to you sound like a computer or has more like an audio book sound to you."Most publishers have this feature blocked. The voice is serviceable, but nothing I think you would want to listen to over a long period of time.
Regards, Jim
There is very much lost with the computerized voice. It doesn't pause where there needs to be pauses, it reads titles the same as regular paragraphs. It lists numbers strange. Half the time I'm straining to figure out what it said. I'd be terrified to have it read something like "The Windup Girl" which is what I'm reading right now. All those foreign words would be too much for that little device.The way Amazon advertised it is about the only way I see use it, the occasional listen while doing dishes or driving in the car on the way to work. Much past that I don't think I'd understand the story very well.
That being said, I don't use it at all. Not once have I thought when I get in my car "hey, I'll use the Kindle reading feature."
I remember having the Kindle 2 read the first page of Heart of Darkness to me. I think I understood 6 words of it. It's like having a 15-year-old Mac computer read to you. I think this feature was Amazon's way of getting another bullet item on their features list. Maybe it's something they will put a lot of money into R&D and advance the text-to-speech technology eventually. Amazon does own Audible, so maybe it would be in their best interest to do so.
Thank you all. That was one of the reasons I was wanting to sell my Sony Ereader for a Kindle.I am able to listen to audio during my work day and I found the text to speech feature appealing but now hearing how frustrating and incomprehensible it is maybe I will pass and keep the reader I have. Hopefully when Google releases Google Edition (I believe that is going to be the name) I will find more ebook options for less.
This seems like as good as any place to ask...does anybody know if in iBooks (on iPod Touch, specifically) there is a way to turn off all the fancy crap (like the page turns)? I really really really loathe the interface it is slow and clunky.
They just updated it yesterday. It seems better.
Actually I got that update and it seems as slow, if not slower. But part of that might be because I have an older Touch. Honestly, if I could turn off the stupid page turn animation I might be "happyish" with it. I definitely prefer the Kindle app (though having a Kindle, I might be biased).
Are you waiting for the dots to stop moving at the bottom? It seems to repaginate the whole book when you first open it or change the font.
The Sword and Laser
Books mentioned in this topic
Infinite Jest (other topics)The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (other topics)
The Passage (other topics)
Since the recent price cut bonanza going on between the Nook and the Kindle i find myself compelled to now seriously consider a purchase or to drop some serious hints since my birthday is very soon.
so that means i have to decide which one?
Kindle or Nook?
I'm sure some of you have either one or the other or maybe both so which is the better or at least smarter choice?