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I am kind of enamoured with these electronic book ideas and think they would be excellent for flights but am not sure which to get.

A part of me think they are just a gimmick that will soon get very old, however I have been yearning for one for over a year which implies if I buy one it may have some legs to it.

Any suggestions?

Personally, I would avoid anything from Sony. In the past, I have owned a Sony TV, PDA, VCR and DVD player. All of them did not last (I only had the TV for two years and ended up getting a refund from the retailer), so now I don't get any Sony products. I realise I am in the minority because most people will recommend them. I can only go on my own experience.

In case you hadn't already guessed, I would go with the Kindle given the choice.

See I have had the very opposite experience with Sony so I was leaning towards them!

I bought a VCR 12 years ago that still works... just!

It is also slightly cheaper and looks more booklike but the Kindle has wireless access to it's online store (in certain hotspots of course) and a keyboard.

The battery life is apparently better on the Kindle (when not using the wireless connection) which is probably my biggest draw to that.

Bear in mind that, although Sony has a history of making its electronics rather proprietary, the opposite is true in this case. The Sony reader is more compatible than the Kindle, which also uses DRM to restrict what you can do with it. If you want to read PDFs go with the Sony device.

I'm not sure about these plateforms, I kinda feel like they're a bit of a one trick poney.

What benefit do they offer over an e-book for instance, presumably you can read .pdf on an e-book, and do a myriad of other things on it as well, which you probably can't on a Kindle?

I also think you can download the kindle reader on a PC?

That's just me though, I admit they look nifty, and can definitely see the attraction

I have an illiad, which is a great piece of kit. Nice leather cover. I never used to buy e-books because i didnt like reading them off the computer. This baby opened up a new avenue for CUPS for me!

A_n_t wrote:See I have had the very opposite experience with Sony so I was leaning towards them!

Most people do have good experiences with Sony. I've just been incredibly unlucky which is why I now avoid their products. If you like the Sony reader, go for it. To be honest, I don't know enough about either of them to recommend one over the other. I just wanted to have a moan about Sony.

I have had a Sony reader for about four months now - I bought it over the Kindle for compatability reasons.

I am delighted with it. I commute for three hours a day and it is a real boon on the train. Last week I finished the second book in a trilogy mid-journey and started the next one immediately. No carrying a total of 950 pages with me. The biggest boon for me though will come on holiday. I can while away a day reading on the beach easily and now I only have to take the Reader rather than a pile of novels for a fortnight away.

The e-ink is incredibly easy on the eye - I really struggle reading off a laptop screen and much prefer to print things out - I have read on the Reader for two hours non-stop with no problem, it really is like looking at ink on a page.

And battery life hasn't been a problem yet. As I said, mine gets used for 2-3 hours a day minimum and I find myself plugging it in for a recharge at the weekends, even though it isn't fully discharged - just to prepare for the week ahead.

My only problem lies around prices for e-books. At the moment they are in general slightly more expensive than the paper equivalent and there ar few/no '3 for 2' type offers. Additionally if a book is only out in hard book, the ebook price will be equivalent to the hard back price. When the book comes out in paper back, the ebook price will drop similarly.

BUT the e-version hasn't changed. There is a tangible difference vetween hardback and paperback books which can justify the price differential, but none for the e-version.

Therefore I have stocked up on books from Project Gutenberg - not necessarily loads of books I'd necessarily choose in a book shop - which is no bad thing - and all free of charge. I am about to start on Poe's complete works.

All in all if you read a lot and find yourself carrying loads of novels around with you - get one of these, they are great.

Richard

I got the Sony e-book reader and I was delighted with it. Very easy to hold, very easy on the eye. It was perfect. However the screen can break quite easily and it is as cheap to buy a new unit as to replace the screen (can't figure that one out, but it's true). Also, the battery life is far far shorter than they claim.

I have not owned a Kindle but I don't like the look of it, or the keyboard.

You cannot read PDFs with ease on the Sony Reader - they display them very poorly.

As an author I have a very big issue with the cost of e-books. If you pay a tenner for one of my books I will get 75 cent. The publisher will get a little over a euro. The bookshop will get about three euro. The rest goes on production costs (printing, administration, etc) and whatever goes to the government.

With an e-book there are no production costs and no cut for the bookshop. So why are they as expensive as real books? They should come out at half the price of a paper book, and they will not become popular until this is the case.

this makes me feel sad...i enjoy the physical nature of a book too much...the feel, the smell...bah humbug to these book reader things..

I don't think we're there yet with ereaders. I don't even think we've gonna have dedicated ereader hardware in the future; I think it's gonna be an application on a mobile device once the quality of being able to read on a mobile device improves. At the moment I don't like to read much on my iPhone; mostly because the software I use to read/share ebooks and PDFs (iDisk, if anyone cares) is cumbersome to use

And you're right about pricing. The distribution method is still very scattered with publishers making entire iPhone apps for a single book, which is crazy. They need to make it a central function of future devices to have "ebooks" next to "Address book" and "iTunes". With an iTunes store type distribution method with £2 novels

Maybe it will help with piracy too

TonyB wrote:With an e-book there are no production costs and no cut for the bookshop. So why are they as expensive as real books? They should come out at half the price of a paper book, and they will not become popular until this is the case.

It's like anything else. When something is first released, be it an e-book or a loaf of bread, it will come out at the highest possible price they think they can get away with charging. If it sells in sufficient quantities and continues to do so, they have no reason to decrease the price. It's only when sales stall significantly on a long term basis will they have to consider dropping prices. If people stopped paying stupid money for things, prices would have to come down eventually.

Looking increasingly like the Sony Reader then!

I have to admit I was a bit shocked at the pricing of books but I expect it will come down eventually, this is probably why I did not buy one straight away and am still toying with the idea a year later.

There are many books available that are cheap though, just generally not new releases. I expect it will go the same way as mp3's. As soon as the players came down drastically in price the songs followed suit as demand sustained the market at a lower price.

It's a waste of time paying for hosting, merchant costs, online storage, bandwidth etc. if only 10 people are likely to buy the book.

The reason ebooks cost as much as paper books is because the publishers still require their cut, which has always been the largest chunk of the cover price (it'a actually around half, but no one else in the deal gets close to that percentage).

Iain - don't worry, some things are still only available on paper. JK Rowling has so far refused to allow her Harry Potter titles to become digitised aberrations!

Ted wrote:The reason ebooks cost as much as paper books is because the publishers still require their cut, which has always been the largest chunk of the cover price (it'a actually around half, but no one else in the deal gets close to that percentage).

The publishers cut is nowhere near half. Not even close.
But even if your overinflated figure was right, with the author getting 7.5%, that leaves 42.25% unaccounted for.
If e-books were half the price of paper books the publishers would get a generous cut, and people would start buying them in significant amounts.