Aug

6

Amazon Kindle - Sony Reader Comparison

Filed Under Kindle, Reader, Reviews, Uncategorized, e-Book, ePub, eReader | Leave a Comment

A recent post at Blog Shop Review states a preference for the Amazon Kindle over the Sony Reader.

I have owned the first generation Sony Reader since last December, and read over twenty books on it, and just recently purchased the Kindle. While the Kindle is not perfect, it is superior to the Sony Reader in several meaningful ways that make it a far superior choice[.]

The first reason listed for the Kindle preference is available books: “[T]he number of books available for purchase for the Kindle is at least triple the number available from Sony.” (We have noted here at eReader Central that Sony did recently announce support for the EPUB format in the updated PRS-505 Reader, which serves to increase the number of ebooks that are compatible with that model of the Reader.)

In addition, the Blog Shop Review stated that with the Kindle, “[b]uying books is far easier; they are transferred directly to the Kindle without having to be downloaded first to a computer.” Other features listed as in the Kindle’s favor include screen contrast, available font sizes, the ease of changing pages, and the number of books that can be held in the device’s memory.

Mar

26

Where Are the Books (for the Ectaco jetBook)?

Filed Under News, Uncategorized, eReader | Leave a Comment

Over at Digital Trends they’ve asked an interesting question about Ectaco jetBook Reader: Where are the books for this device?

What’s missing here—besides technical information on what sort of document formats the jetBook supports—is the most obvious thing: books. We’re assuming the jetBook can handle the ASCII content in (say) the texts available via Project Gutenberg, but what about Word documents and PDFs? What about audio books, and the various DRM-protected formats used to distribute them? When Amazon launched its Kindle reader, it had distribution deals in place with major publishers to bring (ahem) top-shelf content to the Kindle immediately. Ectaco doesn’t seem to have any sort of distribution deals to bring content to the jetBook, noting only that “thousands of books can be downloaded for free.”

Continue reading . . .