Mindful Ink

Over the past few weeks I’ve spent some time dealing with eBook readers. One thing I’ve found I can do, most the time, is kind of mindless technical work. I’ve installed Ubuntu on my Mac (in a Boot Camp partition) and used it for a few days (review: great, but still not ready for your prime-time computer user. Spending an entire day finding a patch someone wrote to get your sound card working is not good), I’ve wired up most the apartment so everything works with… well, everything. That sort of thing.

At any rate, combining money from Christmas and my birthday, I decided to get an eBook reader. So, I’m going to discuss them a bit in terms of using them for school (as that is my primary, but hardly the only use). I think this is the emerging way of handling texts, and there’s no reason to wait (for some of us!)

There are a number of different eBook readers that make use of eInk - this is the relatively new display technology that lacks back lighting and is as readable (and often more readable) than paper. I’m going to cover three, briefly.

The Sony Reader 505 - This is the cheapest of the bunch, the prettiest, and has a nice sized group of people “hacking” it to use various formats or convert them. I had one of these and took it back. It is a wonderful device, but for academic use it is unsuitable do its lack of a search function (and a search function is necessary as pagination is different on an ebook reader and you can’t flip super fast through the pages). However, for price and availability, and in a non-academic setting - I’d highly suggest this model. (~$300)

The iRex iLiad - This is the big daddy of eBook devices. It has touch capabilities (you can write, draw on the screen), has a linux core you can install software on, wifi built in, and probably most importantly - a big display - big enough that technical pdf’s can be easily read. This allows you people taking math and science courses to make use of an eBook reader in a meaningful way as OCR-ing the text for reflow isn’t an option. It is, however, much more expensive than the others as well. If I had the extra cash, this would be my device of choice.(~$700)

The Amazon Kindle - What I’m going with. It’s very similar to the Sony Reader except it has search, underline, and annotate functions. It also has a rudimentary web browser, and you can purchase books (and also visit free sites for books, like Project Gutenberg or Feedbooks) and download content immediately. A big deal for me, however, was the ability to get newspapers and magazines on the device. There are ways to do this on the other devices as well, but Amazon seems to do the best job as far as width and breath of quality content. The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times, Slate and Salon? Oh my! (~$400)

The biggest problem, with all these devices, is finding them at the moment is a pain in the butt. All are available through eBay - some at very good prices, just slightly higher than retail, but few are available online. The Sony Reader can often be found at your local Borders, however. The Kindle has a 4-6 week waiting period, the iLiad is “god knows how long” and the Sony Reader is kind of “catch as catch can.” If you are interested in the Kindle, I’d certainly appreciate it if you ordered it through the link to your right.

In Part II of this, I’ll go into getting content for your device, including textbooks.

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