I’ve been waiting over two years for the prices of e-ink based e-book readers to go down, because all of them are currently still way too expensive. As I’m looking for a decent sized display with a resolution of at least 768×1024, or preferably 1024×1280, I don’t expect miracles. Does such an e-reader exist, and is it affordable yet?
Basically, I’d like to be able to read my collection of books while away from my keyboard, mostly in the following formats:
- Printed and scanned PDFs of scientific papers and books up to DIN A4
- PostScript (compressed and uncompressed), again up to DIN A4
- DejaVu, CHM, LIT (without DRM) etc. formats.
- ASCII, UTF-8, ISO-8859-1 etc… (plain text)
- HTML
Most formats can be converted and transcoded back and forth — that’s not the problem. But my minimal requirement is to be able to read PDFs of scanned DIN A4 pages. And that’s the problem:
- Most current e-readers’ displays are too small and low-res to display a DIN A4 page without zooming or scrolling;
- Most e-readers can handle normal PDF (they even reflow the text), but are either extremely slow reading a scanned PDF (bitmaps) — including turning pages, or fail to do so altogether.
So what’s the best e-reader out there for this? According to the E-Book Reader Matrix, one of the following larger devices could be interesting:
- iRex iLiad, or iRex Digital Reader 1000,
- Amazon’s Kindle DX (US only)
Because the Kindle DX is a US only product, and transport and import duties into the EU would be prohibitively high, this leaves the iLiad and the DR 1000 as the only viable competitors for now. Sadly, both are not without drawbacks:
- They are very expensive (over 500 to 800 Euro)
- They have a low battery life of some 10 hours or so (Why? Isn’t it e-Ink? Are they always on?)
- They need 50+ seconds just to boot (Linux)
Moreover, I’m not sure they can be hooked up to my FreeBSD/amd64 machine without proprietary software which runs only on Windows; though I may be wrong on that. I expect them to accept Flash memory cards, which I could fill from the outside, bypassing any software compatibility issues.
So, I guess I’ll keep waiting for something better, and less expensive… for now. If you have experiences with e-readers, good and bad, please feel free to comment.
I just got my Amazon Kindle from amazon.com and all I want to say is goodbye to paper but I think the iPad will be kill the Kindle from Amazon
It doesn’t exist yet, but the XO 2 (OLPC) looks like an interesting candidate to me. The XO 1 has a very nice reflective black-and-white mode display, which was very useful on bright summer days. It’s resolution is 1200×900. It is of course bigger than an e-book, although this might not be true for the iPad ;) I have seen a Sony Reader 600, (which does not have a backlight, bad during winter days, and a plus for the XO 1), and the contrast of its display is in my judgement equal to that of the XO without backlight.
Also, regarding battery lifetime: I read a book on the Sony Reader in PDF format, and I have the impression that the battery drained much faster than with less computationally-intensive formats (maybe 5 hours for this particular pdf). For the XO1, battery lifetime is about 5 hours, but this should improve with the (not yet implemented) e-book mode.
However, with the give 1, get 1 program, price is comparable to current e-books. oh, i just looked and it seems this program doesn’t exist anymore since this year.. well, maybe once the prices for e-books have fallen, there will be a g1g1 program for the xo2 ;)
i have to correct myself.. the g1g1 program doesn’t exist anymore since last year
Admiring the time and effort you put into your blog and detailed information to offer!
Edit: Removed your URL, because it locks Adblock(+) users out. -Farid.
Things have without doubt moved on in the past few months regarding eReaders. I remember just awhile back that everyone was talking about the Sony eReader although since then we have witnessed the likes of Amazon release Kindle units and swiftly pursued by the ipad from apple. The growth of the gadget is i believe motivated through the development of the ebook products themselves – there are now a huge number of quality books on the market that are compatible with the majority of models. I wound up purchasing a Kindle unit given the price of the ipads at present are beyond reach, like i said previously, Amazon have grabbed the marketplace by the throat and dramatically reduced their selling prices in order to be competitive, we all as buyers need to take advantage don’t we!