Adrian F

Stuck for Xmas present ideas for parents (over 60's) so have been looking at these anyone got the Sony PRS650 (£225) or the iRiver EB03(£82) or the latest kindle(£109)?

As a present i am more interested in the quality of product and running cost e.g. cost of books, range of books other than top ten and cost to replace batteries etc or the longevity of the books format when upgrading to a different E-Book reader when this ones battery dies.

any experiences or advice would be help full

DaveMiddleton

I have a Kindle and think it is superb. Have now read at last 20 books since I got it in September (I travel a lot and thus read on planes and in airports).
Books range from free (older classics) to circa £3-7 each and once finished you can offload them to be saved for you on Amazon server. Higly recommended. Book range is vast.

Kieran_Burns

iTrader: (1)

+1 to all of the above, the Kindle is a piece of technology that just works. Gets on with it with no fuss.

what would scooby do

Kindle end of...

warrenm2

for me the bit that sells the kindle is the free 3g web browsing. The only worry is how its described as experimental and hence may be discontinued...

MrJim

another vote for the kindle

Markus

Ok, first up, my comments will be seen as biased as I work for Kobo, but I'm not in sales (QA for the iOS team) and so not trying to push things.

If we sold our reader in the UK (probably will next year - hardly helpful to you now though is it!) then I would suggest having a look at it. As we don't sell the reader, have a look at our site, as we sell the books. They can be read on any device that can handle ADE DRM encrypted epub files (ADE = Adobe Digital Editions).

One thing I know about Kindle is that there books are in a proprietary format and therefore publishers need to encode the books for Kindle. This means you can't take your books and put them on another device. So if the Kindle does go **** up, you might not be in a great position. Amazon might remove the DRM, or switch to ADE, but you'd have thought they would have done that in the first place. I'd guess they just want people using Kindle and not other readers.

We're different, if you have an ADE compatible device, you can read your books on it. If you have an iPhone, iPad and Blackberry, hey, read the same book on the different devices at the same time, we don't mind.

As for pricing, some are cheaper than the real world, others are not, or on par with a proper book.

I know, I know, sounds like a sales pitch

alcazar

iTrader: (2)

Yet another non-compatible medium.

You'd think people would have learnt after the success of CD and Compact Flash?

Adrian F

Is not the problem with the Kindle that Amazon can charge what they want for the books as its closed market.

Also would a non-kindle reader have access to a larger library of free books?

ScoobyWon't

I installed the Kindle app on my HTC Desire HD and started browsing over 400 free titles that were on offer. I don't mind buying the Kindle edition of books as I don't remember the last time I purchased a book from anywhere but Amazon.

I actually liked it instantly as all I had to do was tap the screen to turn the page instead of holding a book and rustling the pages, while the other half tries to sleep.

Scotsman

iTrader: (3)

Both my wife and I love our Kindles - best piece of kit we've bought since getting Sky+!

With Calibre, http://calibre-ebook.com/, you can convert anything to the Kindle format. Doesn't get any simpler.

Richard.

Markus

Possibly. There are sites such as gutenberg project, epubbooks, and others that offer free epubs. Typically classic books or copyright free ones. Any newish book you'll have to pay for though.