E-Readers have captured the world by storm the last few years and many people are just discovering them, or looking to upgrade. There is plenty available to choose from but what factors make some better then others? In this months list we take into account not only the good e-readers out there, but also how they deliver the content. Most people want their books, magazines and newspapers delivered quick and efficencaly and don’t want to jump through a ton of hoops.
1) The Amazon Kindle WIFI – Special Offers Edition
The Special Offers edition gives you a six inch e-reader with the latest PEARL e-ink technology to provide; fast page turns, quick menu navigation and more. You can buy books and audio books via Amazon and have them delivered very quickly to your device.
This device is proving to be quite popular because of its paltry price of $114! The drawback is that it serves you advertisements via the screensaver and menus. You don’t see the adverts in the books thankfully but with the low cost it is attracting a wider audience.Currently this model is the companies strongest seller but is only available online in the USA.
The Kobo Touch is the first touchscreen e-reader served by Kobo and its a dandy! It features a six inch Pearl e-ink display with a faster processor then the Amazon Kindle. It has one single home button and the rest of the time you are pressing the virtual keyboard or various menus. One of the most exciting new elements to this e-reader are the social media aspects that the “Reading Life” brings to the table. It awards you achivements for reading and brings statistics into the fold. It will monitor your reading habbits, how many books you read and so on, to compete against friends.
The Kobo bookstore currently has over 2.2 million titles and many of them are free! You can also get local magazines and newspapers to satiate your litterary thrist! It is highly affordable at $139 and raises the bar on e-readers.
3) Barnes and Noble Nook 2 – AKA The Simple Touch Reader
The Barnes and Noble Nook 2 is being billed as the simplest e-reader ever created! It features a full touchscreen 6 inch PEARL display with a resolution of 800×600 pixels and 16 levels of gray scale. The screen looks very good and is said to have 50% better contrast then the original Nook 3G and WFI. This new e-reader is blazing fast with the 800Mhz processor it has underneath the hood. It is running on the Google Android 2.1 OS and many people have already loaded Angry Birds and other apps on it.
The Nook 2 is the new Barnes and Noble flagship e-reader and will be the standard e-ink model the company goes with in the future. The only drawback is that the unit does not have speakers to play audio books or mp3’s.
4) The Barnes and Noble Nook Color
The Nook Color is the perfect example of a tablet being billed as an e-reader and actually functions as one. It blends the combination of the two to the pinacle of perfection. The Nook Color is a full touch screen Android Tablet with a 7 inch capacitive color touchscreen with a resolution of 1024×600. It has a built in accelerometer that will switch the screen between landscape and portrait mode.
The big successes of this device is the textbooks, kids books, magazines and newspapers you can subscribe to. Most of this content is all in full color and looks really good. You connect to the internet via WIFI and can easily surf the internet with the web browser. The company also introduced an appstore recently so you can easily download apps, games and more. It retails for around $259 dollars and is the best bang for your buck in Android Tablets.
The Pocketbook 360 Plus features a 5 inch Vizplex eink display with an impressive resolution of 800×600 pixels. Its backbone is a 533 MHZ Samsung Processor and it has 128 MB of RAM. The storage is quite modest at 2 GB to store your media, but of course you can further enhance this up to 32 GB via the MicroSD.
One of the most highly advertised features on this device is its ability to access the internet via the integrated WIFI. This will allow feature firmware updates to be “pushed” right to your Pocketbook. The ability to use the internet is something the direct competition (Jetbook Mini) is incapable of doing.
The best aspect of this device is how easy and portable it is, you will have no fear carrying this in your pocket or bag all day. This device is perfect for those who love to load in their own ebooks because it handles so many different formats.
This about wraps it up for this months top 5 e-readers! Remember you can purchase all of these e-readers internationally at Shop e-Readers!
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
