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Amazing E-Book Reader Alternative

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There is an amazing new e-book reader out that is slimmer than all other readers and has almost unlimited battery life. The best part, it is eco-friendly and costs next to nothing.
 
uhh ha ha, did this come from The Onion? because all of their "stories" have that same bad joke gron to them.
 
How do they expect to sell any of these with out the Apple icon on them? :rolleyes:
 
LMAO. Classic.

I never understood the concept of an e-book reader or why I should pay so much for one.
 
ßeta;1033216674 said:
The light power makes the battery life last as long as a light is on.
Click to expand...

I think it has front light instead of backlight, too bad it doesn't come with built in screen brigthness adjustment.
 
I'm going to give some out for gifts this year for Xmas. People will love them. I've wanted an eBook reader for while now myself.
 
nösferatu;1033217492 said:
I think it has front light instead of backlight, too bad it doesn't come with built in screen brigthness adjustment.
Click to expand...

Nope, it comes with no light.

Think of e-paper like a super high tech etch-a-sketch. LCDs work by having light emit through layers of filters. E-paper works by changing the actual physical state of a pixel. Because of this it can be read in broad daylight (in fact, it only gets better as it gets brighter), and unlike LCDs the intensity or quality doesn't change if you view the screen at oblique angles. It behaves nothing like an LCD. The text on e-paper looks like ink, really awesome.

The Kindle is the best tech gadget I have bought in a very very long time. The thing is a godsend considering how many books I like to keep with me when I'm traveling for business. Instead of carrying two or three books in my carry-on, I have dozens in a little device that is as thick as a pen. On top of that I read faster with it than I do with a normal book. No fumbling with pages, just click click click. That it has a dictionary/thesaurus built in and I can annotate or highlight sections as I please is also great. So yeah, it really is an awesome device.
 
E-Ink is more akin to an Etch-a-Sketch than anything else, basically. The "pixels" get effectively turned on (can't think of a better way to describe it) and show as black; off-pixels remain the shade of white aka the paper.

So imagine having an Etch-a-Sketch with actual "writing" on it like you could "print" a page of text on it. The only time power is used is to change the state of the pixels from off to on.

Once in that state, no power is consumed again until the pixels need to be altered in state, hence the long battery life of E-Ink displays. And yes, they really do look just like text on a printed page, it's fairly amazing stuff. The Sony eBook readers are very nice pieces of hardware, just ridiculously expensive - but then again I can say that about every eBook device that's ever been made.

We had a thread in the Mobile Computing thread a few months back about such devices and there was an effort that supposedly got underway to create a sub-$200 eBook tablet that I was hoping would come true, but it looks like the entire development is a big pile of random crap with no direction, unfortunately. It was going to be several things at once, actually. The project sorta kinda started here:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/21/we-want-a-dead-simple-web-tablet-help-us-build-it/

I love that prototype image and only wish they could pull it off. If I had the money to invest or the knowledge to make it an actual product, I'd be all over it.

I'm content to use my Dell Axim with a VGA LCD screen for the moment. The iPhone and iPod touch are nice as well these days but their resolution isn't as high. Damned nice displays though...
 
twatt said:
I'm going to give some out for gifts this year for Xmas. People will love them. I've wanted an eBook reader for while now myself.
Click to expand...

Its too bad that there are so few out there to actually look at. I held off on buying one until I saw a friend's back in June. I had one of my own a few days later. I've sold around six Kindles to other people since. If you're unsure, then see if a retailer around you has a Sony PRS-505. The physical button interface is inferior to the Kindle's and it isn't hooked directly into a store like Amazon's (one-click e-book purchasing from the website is evil but oh so effective...). That said, they do have the same screen. It'll give you a pretty fair idea of what to expect with the Kindle as far as readability goes.
 
Joe Average said:
I'm content to use my Dell Axim with a VGA LCD screen for the moment. The iPhone and iPod touch are nice as well these days but their resolution isn't as high. Damned nice displays though...
Click to expand...

First off, I had to laugh that someone else used the etch-a-sketch analogy. :)

Second, here's a picture I took of my Kindle next to my iPhone, taken at an off-angle with sunlight blasting through the shades in my home office.

Kindle2.jpg


Traditional LCD makes for a decent surface for long term reading but it isn't nearly as easy on the eyes as an e-ink display, given that one is projected light and the other is an actual physical "printed" surface with texture and weight. There are huge advantages to e-ink technology, but at the same time it has very limited applications given the nearly non-existent refresh rate the displays have (its why there is a separate normal LCD for the navigation strip on the right).

It'll be nice once these things get cheaper, but until then we'll have to deal. Perhaps it'll get cheaper as these devices catch on, we'll see. Given the amount of traveling I do and how much I like to read, the Kindle is well worth the price I paid for it and I wouldn't hesitate recommending one for a second.

One last shot, one taken millimeters from the page, smallest font size, taken at a very oblique angle. Note the total lack of typical LCD fading.

Kindle3.jpg
 
Yah yah, if I was independently wealthy I'd just design my own... ;)

And yep, they're damned nice devices to have. The eReader eBook reader (free) is kinda nice, actually - for the iPhone/iPod touch. Was so close to buying an iPod touch recently, soooo close, but the Axim is more functional for me and I got a kickass package of stuff (extra cradle, extra batteries, extra AC adapter, several storage cards, software, etc) for $100 off Craig's List so, this is now my 5th Dell Axim in 3 years. ;)

I'm still waiting on the perfect eBook reader. I do like almost all the aspects of the Kindle, but that price... ugh. It'll forever keep me away from it and others that are up there in that range.

Of course, the eBook reader this thread is about, now THAT is something I can afford. hehehe
 
One funny thing. Shortly after I ordered my Kindle I get an email from Amazon saying that its in transit and that it has already been registered to my account. Translation: I can start buying e-books for it now and they will automatically download when I fire it up.

OH REALLY?

Yeah, I had over half a dozen books ordered before the thing even reached me. One-click shopping makes it soooo easy. :(

Between my purchases on Amazon and the free books I have, I'm looking at almost four dozen books on the device. Again, for someone like me that travels for work all the time, GODSEND. I wish I'd had such a device loaded with all my textbooks back when I was in college.
 
CaptNumbNutz said:
LMAO. Classic.

I never understood the concept of an e-book reader or why I should pay so much for one.
Click to expand...

The concept is that you can have thousands of books in one small device and can continue to get new books on the same device. This saves loads of paper
and if you're a pirate you can get books for free.

I wonder if we will see DRM for books and magazines when electronic paper become the norm.
 
dochmbi said:
The concept is that you can have thousands of books in one small device and can continue to get new books on the same device. This saves loads of paper
and if you're a pirate you can get books for free.

I wonder if we will see DRM for books and magazines when electronic paper become the norm.
Click to expand...

It already is the norm. As much as I love the Kindle, the books you buy for it on Amazon all have DRM. Books, magazines, etc, are all linked to your Amazon.com account. You can have up to six Kindles registered to a single account for books, while magazine and newspaper subscriptions can only be downloaded to a single Kindle (I have read that you can still transfer them between Kindles in the same account after it has been downloaded). A family could presumably have a shared library if they all had Kindles, but it is still limited in that the purchases and libraries are all one and the same.

There are ways to take out the DRM and convert the e-books the normal .mobi files if you want to. And of course there are tens of thousands of books in the public domain with no DRM.

Many can be found here: http://www.feedbooks.com/ http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page
 
Serpico said:
I wish I'd had such a device loaded with all my textbooks back when I was in college.
Click to expand...

Me too! I'm in college now but absolutely none of my books have electronic alternatives usable for the class.

Hopefull by the time I'm in Grad school this will happen. (Freshman now)
 
450 said:
Me too! I'm in college now but absolutely none of my books have electronic alternatives usable for the class.

Hopefull by the time I'm in Grad school this will happen. (Freshman now)
Click to expand...

We'll see, it would be nice. There'd be savings in cost and obviously weight and bulk. Unfortunately I don't know how long it will take for this sort of thing to really gain traction. I dunno, maybe another 10-20 years?
 
Just grabbed a 1st generation 8GB iPod touch at a pawn shop in downtown Vegas last night...

$80 out the door, no cables, nothing. They couldn't get it to turn on (was pawned way back in May and apparently the battery totally died over the past 5 months). They couldn't get it to charge either (didn't have a proper USB cable) so I took a chance on it. Got it home, plugged it in (with a proper iPod USB cable), let it sit for a few minutes, then did the hard reset (hold Sleep+Home until the Apple appears)... voila! Saved myself who knows how much money. ;)

Loading it up with some stuff for testing at the moment, but I'll probably stick with Stanza off the App Store so far. eReader is ok, but Stanza seems to work a bit better, handles more formats, and it's free compared to a few others like Bookshelf (eReader is free, however).

I'm planning to mod this thing and get a larger capacity battery for it at some point if I can find one. It uses a 3-lead Lithium Polymer and I haven't been able to track down a larger cap (the stock is 950 mAh) one just yet, but if and when I do, it'll all fit inside this:

ifrogztreadzoy6.png


I lubz that damned case, I really do. ;)
 
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