While many people have turned to their iPads and Android tablets for the purpose of reading e-books, there is still very much a market for the dedicated eReader. The e-ink display is so much easier on the eyes and the battery life is way better than what you’d get from a tablet. But, which one is best?

A quick comparison has been put together with some of the heaviest hitters in this space, taking a look at the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite, Kindle, Kindle Keyboard, Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight, Nook Simple Touch, and Kobo Glo. There are others to be considered, like those from Sony or other Kobos, but these are some of the most popular and their comparison should help narrow down your choices.

Display

All six of the eReaders featured in this overview use some form of e-ink technology for their displays rather than the regular backlit LCDs you find on tablets. You’ll also notice that they’ve all congregated on the 6-inch form factor, though you’ll find other variations from Amazon, B&N and Kobo that come in other sizes. The resolutions are mostly the same, though the Paperwhite and the Glo have significantly better PPIs. It’s also noteworthy that the Glo, Paperwhite and Nook with Glowlight are the ones with lit displays for dim reading situations.

Size and Weight

Since they all have six-inch displays, the overall dimensions of all these eReaders are roughly the same. They measure approximately 165 x 120 x 10mm with some variation and they all weigh right around 170-210 grams or so. The lone exception is the Kindle Keyboard, since it has that physical QWERTY keyboard beneath the display, stretching its length to 190mm and bumping its weight to 247g.

Storage Space

Not surprisingly, all six of the eReaders also have roughly the same amount of storage space. After all, e-books are very small files and you don’t need much space. The Paperwhite and Kindle both have 2GB, while the Kindle Keyboard has 4GB. The Nooks and Kobo Glo all have 2GB, plus a microSD expansion slot. That memory expansion could prove to be an important feature for people who want to carry a lot of content with them.

Wireless

They all have Wi-Fi, but you can opt to get the Kindle Paperwhite as a WiFi+3G mdel. The Kindle Keyboard is sold only as a WiFi+3G eReader.

Battery Life

The Kindle, Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight, and Kobo Glo all have batteries rated in the 4 week range, while the Kindle Paperwhite, Kindle Keyboard and Nook Simple Touch (sans GlowLight) last twice as long at about 8 weeks. Of course, your mileage will vary based on usage, especially when it comes to how much you use the lighting features. Charging any of these eReaders will take you 3 to 4.5 hours.

Other Considerations

If you want to read in dimly lit situations, you’ll want to opt for one of the eReaders that comes with some form of lit display. That’s the Kindle Paperwhite, the Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight or the Kobo Glo. If you want to take advantage of Amazon’s gigantic library, then you’ll want one of the Kindles. If you want a keyboard, then you’ll want to the Kindle Keyboard. Of course, there are some tradeoffs if you want, say, a keyboard and a backlight, because that just doesn’t exist.

Price

This will be a big deciding factor for many people. The cheapest of the bunch is the regular old Kindle that starts at $69, but you could also consider something like the Kobo Mini (5-inch) that starts at around the same price range. It is worth noting that all Kindles come with the “Special Offers” advertising that you’ll have to pay $20 to eliminate. If you hate ads, you’ll need to factor that into the price. It’s also debatable whether the Kindle Keyboard is really worth its premium just for a keyboard.

At the end of the day, which eReader you choose will really depend on several factors. Price is one, to be sure, but you’ll also want to think about size, backlighting, and the ecosystem. Whatever the case, it’s a good time to be a consumer, because we are offered a lot more choice than when the original Kindle was the be-all and end-all of e-book readers.

[Source]

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And that appears to be the idea behind the Floater ePhone concept by designer Jeong Jaewan. What you get is a device with a standard 4.6-inch smartphone display, but this can be “unfolded” to give a 6-inch experience similar to the Kindle. The designer uses the word unfolded, but it looks more like the secondary display fits into a slot in the main unit. I’d worry that this makes the main device far too thick by today’s standards.

He also says that these are LCDs, but the concept images look a lot more like the e-ink displays that you see on eReaders like the Kindle or Kobo. Whatever the case, it looks a little too clunky for my tastes and it certainly doesn’t help that it’s called the Floater. Some things just don’t translate well.

[Source]

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The allegation is that Apple colluded with several book publishers to keep the prices of e-books higher in an effort to limit competition. More specifically, it says that this collusion was in direct response to the lower prices being offered by Amazon, which is known to sell best-seller e-books at $9.99. The publishers still wanted their books sold, but at $9.99, they weren’t making enough money.

And thus, the publishers had the same goal as Apple: keep the prices higher. It is “hard to settle a lawsuit when you know you have done no wrong,” said Macmillan (Holtzbrinck Publishers) CEO John Sargent. “Macmillan did not collude.”

The iBookstore from Apple is estimated to have about a 10-15% market share among e-books, compared to the around 60% that the Amazon enjoys, though that figure is down from the 90% it had some time back.

[Source]

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On paper (no pun intended), this sounds like a great idea. To this day, I still enjoy going to the public library to borrow books, DVDs, and all sorts of other content that I may not otherwise buy. This public resource is fantastic, especially for people who can’t afford to otherwise immerse themselves in this much content. And now e-books are part of the mix too.

However, the public library treats the digital copy of a book much like the paper version of a book. They have a certain number of copies and, if they are all currently borrowed, you have to put yourself on the waiting list. This is just like borrowing a physical book, probably because of copyright legalities. The convenience is that you can “borrow” the e-books from the comfort of your home, because they can be downloaded directly through your local library’s website (which will direct you through Amazon.com).

Since an e-book is treated like a physical book, you could find yourself on very long wait lists for popular e-books. Realistically, though, this is no worse than waiting for a physical book and I applaud the public libraries for making this big technological step.

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Last month, the ad-supported Amazon Kindle was revealed at a paltry $114. Even if you do away with the ads, an entry-level Kindle is still only $139. Well, now you can land yourself a Nook from Barnes and Noble for the same $139, except this one gets a touchscreen.

No, it’s not really the same as the more expensive (and Android-powered) Nook Color, but the lower-cost Nook e-reader still gives you a touchscreen interface on its 6-inch display. It’s also 35% lighter than its predecessor. If you want to go cheaper, the original Nook is now $119, though B&N has stopped making them.

The Nook is second only to the Kindle when it comes to the dedicated e-book reader market and this cheaper touchscreen option should help with that growth. Not everyone wants to spend $499+ on an iPad, you know. In any case, the new touchscreen Nook is available now through the B&N site and will show up in retail stores (including Best Buy) next month.

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I know. It’s a little weird finding a product like this from a company that normally specializes in turntables and other audio equipment, but you also have to realize that they’ve already developed products to convert vinyl records into MP3 files. The same kind of philosophy is taken with converting paper-based books into digital ones.

Yes, the Book Saver looks like quite the contraption with its spider-like legs and almost post-apocalyptic stance, but that’s part of why it can work so quickly. They’re saying that a 200-page book can be scanned and converted to e-book in 15 minutes.

The clever contraption consists of an angled cradle for holding your book and an upper frame with two cameras and built-in flash units (one pointed at each page). You snap the picture, flip the page, and move on. Each pair of pages takes about a second. At the end, the e-book is recorded onto an SD card and away you go.

You know what would help this $149 scanner even more? If it had some kind of mechanism for flipping the pages for you. Perhaps the $100,000 ScanRobot would better suit your needs.

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When it comes to the world of e-book readers, the Barnes & Noble Nook Color is a fairly unique breed. That’s because it’s really running Android under the hood, making it one of the cheapest Android “tablets” available on the market. B&N has been selling it as an e-reader, but it seems that the device’s status is getting upgraded.

How so? Barnes & Noble plans on upgrading the Nook Color to Android 2.2 Froyo next month. Granted, the Nook Color is nowhere near powerful enough to run the biggest of Android apps, but a little hackery on your part can make for quite an interesting little proposition. It helps that it’s getting more popular too with one million units expected to be sold by the end of the year.

Is it really just a matter of semantics, though? The existing Nook Color can technically qualify as a tablet too, since it’s already based on Android, but based on this report from Digitimes, it sounds like a more vanilla version of Android’s OS could be ready for the Nook Color. Personally, I think that could be just wishful thinking. B&N has already limited access to the Android Market on the device.

After all, the Nook Color is never going to have the horsepower of a PlayBook, iPad, or Galaxy Tab.

[DigiTimes]

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Ebooks are doing great business, and this is not an exaggerated claim. Surveys conducted by market research firm Forrester show that the already massive ebook business is likely to do even better in the times to come. Forrester surveyed nearly 4000 people and the findings showed that they purchased ebooks worth $ 996 million this year. Though only 7% of the total surveyed populace bothered to actually ‘read’ the ebooks in entirety, the bucks spent by them clearly show the tremendous rise in popularity of ebooks.

Shocked? Wait, there’s more to come. The survey reflected that the ardent book lovers did 41% of their reading in digital format. Surely the numbers are impressive, but this popularity of ebooks doesn’t denote a similar rise in power of ebook readers. A good number of ebook lovers prefer to use their laptop for reading, and, just in case you are a number-cruncher, those using a reader are divided in the following manner:

• 32% on Amazon’s Kindle
• 15% on Apple iPhone
• 12% on Sony e-Reader
• 10% on netbooks

Beyond that, Kindle users rely on ebooks most dominantly (a whopping 66% of them read in digital form). That’s no shocking discovery to me!

So having nearly touched the billion dollar mark, ebooks have established themselves as a force to reckon with and killed any doubts in the skeptic mind. What next? Well with the awe-inspiring profits, more publishers are expected to turn to ebooks, giving you and me more of reading pleasure.

Source: Engadget

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Steve O’Hear of TechCrunch has declared that he is a “total Kindle convert,” despite recognizing that the iPad, Samsung Galaxy Tab, and other devices like it could represent the “nail in the coffin” for dedicated e-book readers. Why buy something that can only do one thing when you buy something similar that does many things?

Simple. It’s because the Kindle only does one thing that it can still win over consumers, especially the anti-iPad crowd. According to O’Hear, the Kindle “forces” him to go off the grid and get away from the “background hum” of being always connected. The Kindle doesn’t do Twitter. It doesn’t push email. It doesn’t distract you with all of that “always online” stuff, unplugging you from the matrix and letting you relax with a good read.

I agree that it is important to “go off the grid sometimes,” but I’m not sure if there are enough people out there to support the dedicated e-reader compared to those who want the multifunction device. Think of it this way: how many people want smartphones and how many want phones that do nothing but voice calls?

The case for the dedicated e-reader: When it’s time to go off the grid [TechCrunch EU]
Photo: Flickr

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SigmaTek 7-inch eReader EBKT-101

France’s SigmaTek Computer will be launching a pair of eBook readers at IFA next month. The 5-inch and 7-inch eReaders both have TFT displays with a resolution of 800×480. Inside is a RockChip2808 CPU running 600MHz, nothing sensational and could pose a problem since this eReader is not meant for just eReading. Support for “multimedia” features include AVI, XviD, and MKV video, with MP3, WMA, FLAC, AAC, WAV, and OGG music. How this will handle HD movies remains to be seen, 720p would be expected as it only has 128MB of SDROM.

We’ve been informed that the OS will be “Rockchip OS”, however the specs of this eBook match those of others equipped with Android so that could be a possibility. There is no App store nor support for third party apps yet, so a jailbreak to Android seems possible. Software will be an iTunes like utility for managing your music, photos, videos and books purchased from an “internet website.” That’s great, it means it will be open for you to grab EPUB, PDF and TXT files from anywhere you choose.

They will be in stores this October, for 119 euros and 99 euros for the 7-inch and 5-inch models respectively.

SigmaTek 5-inch eReader EBKT-51

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