Electronic Books

[SuperDuck]

Who here has a Sony Reader, Amazon Kindle, or similar e-book reader? How do you like it?

I read quite a bit and I know that a lot of people (myself included) are of the opinion that nothing can beat the feel of a real book, but for some reason these new e-book readers are grabbing my attention. They're not LCD screens, and are supposed to be great to read. The original digital book did not go over so well, but these new versions seem to be correcting the problems of the previous generation.

My biggest beef is that I would pay a lot of money ($299 for the Sony and $399 for the Amazon) for something that has less storage capacity than a ZIP disk. 20 MEGS of space? Come on, Tickle Me Elmos probably have more than that. The Sony can play mp3s, but how much good is that when you can store less than ten of them on your reader? Also, $300 can buy me a heckuva lot of "real books".

Still, for some reason they are calling to me.

[Tsal]

I have no experience on those, but they seem to satisfy one commercial need, which is electronic distribution of copyrighted literature. They look kinda ok but it would heavily depend on the book prices if it's worth to get one. Of course I assume you can get pirated products for those as well. Oh, at least the Sony model has a memory card slot, so you can have a few gigs of stuff on it.

[ThatGermanDude]

they look interesting for school books. i don't know much about them but i'd rather just carry one of them instead of several heavy textbooks.

[whoapower]

My dad has the Sony one. He's had it since Christmas 2006. I didn't think he'd enjoy it but he carries it with him everywhere, always reading something. It had a nice reading light. Very light. Very compact and portable. Not sure how to compare it to the Kindle if you are in the market.

[Stanley Design]

That's a great idea actually. Also if they had a good amount of memory, you could have narrated versions to hear while you read.