Since I'm involved with movable eBook readers, or eReaders, I often get asked, "What's the best eBook reader?" Unfortunately, there is not a straightforward answer to that question. What the questioner is assuredly request is "what is the best movable eBook reader For Me?" The answer depends on a whole of things, together with what you will be doing with it, the type of documents you want to read, how much you want to spend, and more. So, I decided to write some articles on the types of features and capabilities you should think regarding the eBook reader devices you might purchase.
Let me start right out by listing what I think to be 7 key considerations you should think about as you Ant. Eject all the eBook Reader reviews and comparisons collecting a list of the best eBook Readers, so you can choose the very best eBook Reader, the one you ultimately want to buy, excellent from the panoply of all those fabulous eReaders dancing like sugar plums in your head. So, here are those 7 key factors in no special order:
- Form Factor
- Audio
- Memory / storehouse Capacity
- Digital content Availability
- File Type Compatibility
- Connectivity and Coverage
- Convenience
Ok. I didn't consist of Price. Well, the relevance of price is up to you. For some people, price is not a serious issue; they will buy anything they want, anything it costs. For other people, price is a customary factor. The 7 areas I've included present to the eReader itself, how you will use it, and what you will use it with. So, let's plunge ahead and cover the first key consideration, Form Factor. I'll cover three areas relating to what I refer to as Form Factor: Display Type, Display Size, and Display Quality.
Display Type
eBook readers are available with color displays, and with monochrome displays. Color displays are a well established technology, the Lcd or Liquid Crystal Display. This is the basic technology behind most computer monitors, laptop screens, televisions, smartphones, and God knows how many other devices. It is a solid, mature technology. And it gives you all those fabulous life-like color images.
A monochrome display gives you black and white with shades of gray. The most popular monochrome displays for eBook readers are referred to as electronic paper, e-paper, or E Ink. Technically, these are referred to as "electrophoretic displays", a type of very low-power thin display that is usually referred to as electronic paper, or e-paper because most people won't remember the word "electrophoretic". Electrophoretic displays are used in most monochrome e-book devices such as the Amazon Kindle, the Barnes and Noble Nook, the Sony Reader, the Kobo, the Cybook Gen3, the iRex iLiad and many, many more. The mixture of electronic paper and electronic ink allows text and images to be written onto a surface. The script and images are held for an indefinite duration of time with wee or no power usage. There are a whole of ownership incarnations of electronic ink, with one of the main players being E Ink Corporation of Cambridge, Massachusetts. E Ink is generally carefully the best. They make most of the monochrome eReader displays, so it's worth checking that the display is from E Ink and E Ink Pearl is currently the best version of that technology.
In some versions of electronic ink, the 'ink' appears unremarkable to the naked eye, but within its dark, oily substance flow numerous microcapsules. E Ink has compared these round microcapsules to tiny clear beach balls filled with dark fluid. Within the dark fluid, charged white particles float. If the charged particles rise to the top of the microcapsule, that spot on the page appears as a white dot. If the particles fall to the bottom, the dark liquid forms a black dot. Applying various negative and determined charges across a back pixel-grid supplied by a thin transistor film forms text and images.
Ok. Got sufficient techno stuff on that topic? Suffice it to say that electronic ink is much crisper than Lcd displays, rivaling printed text on white paper. It is easier on the eyes than an Lcd display because it isn't being refreshed a whole of times each second, and it is less reflective than Lcd screens so you can more assuredly read from an electronic ink display in appealing light, or even sunlight. Monochrome E Ink displays are great for naturally reading as you would with a quarterly paperback or hardcover book. Electronic ink displays use so much less power than color Lcd displays that batteries on the better electronic ink eBook readers can last for days, even weeks, compared with hours for even the best of the current crop of color eReaders. The longest battery life I know of for color Lcd display devices is the 10 hours you get with the Apple iPad. And, by the way, I happen to think that 10 hours is pretty darned good.
So what's an Lcd color display got going for it? Well, in a word... Color. If you plan to spend a lot of time with your movable electronic reader appealing magazines, comics, art books, kids' books, textbooks and manuals with color illustrations, or even cookbooks, not to mention the Web, you may want to focus on color e-reader choices like the iPad or the new Nookcolor or the Sharper Image Literati. Remember that Paul Simon song, Kodachrome... "everything looks worse in black and white". Well, it's true. How many people do you know whose house room centerpiece is still a black and white television?
Display Size
Someone seems to have decided that a assuredly suitable size for an eBook reader is the 6 inch diagonal display. A great many of the monochrome eReaders have this 6 inch display. This includes the Kindle, the Nook, the Sony Touch, the Kobo, the Cybook, and many, many more. Some eBook readers have larger screens. The Kindle Dx screen is 9.7 inches measured diagonally. The iRex Digital Reader 800 is 8.1 inches.
eReaders with smaller screens tend to be more 'portable' and convenient, assuredly fitting into a purse or pocket. Smaller screens consume less power. Also, since they are lighter, they are easier to hold for long periods of time. Bigger screens tend to allow better viewing with larger text and especially images and illustrations.
Display Quality
Display potential can be expressed by 2 measurements. One is pixel resolution; the other is referred to as gray scale. Gray scale relates primarily to monochrome displays. Higher level gray scale displays allow better viewing of images and pictures because there are more shades of gray to characterize colors and shadings in the image. While older eReaders had 4-level and 8-level gray-scale displays, the approved today is 16-level gray scale displays and this includes Kindle, Nook, Sony, Kobo, iRex and most others. So, to be brief, if you're inspecting a monochrome eBook reader, make sure it has a 16-level gray scale display unless you assuredly don't plan on viewing images or don't care how good the images appear.
Pixel resolution applies to both monochrome and color displays. This is basically the whole of 'dots' on the display screen. And, just like your computer screen or television, the higher the number, the sharper the display and the clearer you will be able to see or read what is displayed. Fairly approved for the 6 inch monochrome displays is 600 by 800 pixel resolution. The larger Kindle Dx is 824 by 1200. The color Apple iPad is 768 by 1024. The Barnes & Noble Nookcolor is 600 by 1024.
selecting the Best movable eBook Reader: Key Considerations - Form Factor
