Buying an ereader: Kindle, nook or Sony Pocket Reader

[pslasher.livejournal.com]

Hey everyone! I’m probably going to be buying an ereader for Christmas and have narrowed it down to the nook, Kindle or Sony Pocket Reader. But I keep debating over them and thought I’d see what the users have to say.

Amothea says that the Sony Pocket Reader supports collections and has excellent sorting abilities:
My Supernatural collection has over 300 stories but I can within the collections sort by date, author, title, and etc. And once I have the title or author selected it gives me a list A-Z so I can jump to the author at the end very quickly.
Do the Kindle or Nook do anything similar, like support the tags from Calibre? I prefer the look and feel of the nook and Kindle, and they are less expensive than the Sony, but this feature is excellent.

　
Kindle: I REALLY like the long battery life and light weight of the 3G but I have a few questions.

1. I think I heard that fics uploaded to the Kindle from Calibre can be tagged and the Kindle will display those tags and the related ebooks, but I’d like that to be confirmed.
2. Can you browse the web on the Kindle? I think I’d really use that feature for finding new fic that I want to put on the device, and I know the nook can do it.

　
Nook: I LOVE the ability to add extra storage, and to browse the web. I think I’d use the web browsing to find new fic often.

1. Does the nook (black and white) have the ability to create My Shelves like the nook color? Can you sort through books in a collection by author, title, ect?


Is there anything I need to know, good or bad, about the devices? I think I’m leaning towards the nook, but I’m still not sure. I’ve got more thoughts about ereaders here.

Comments

[elf]

#1 Detail: Most people who love reading, love reading on whatever device they get.

#2: This is all cutting-edge tech, which means "buggy as hell and updates every six months change how everything works." All of them have *some* way of sorting ebooks, some more efficient than others; none of them actually work well with large collections. (Over ~2000 books.)

#3: The companies that make the hardware & software seem to be under the delusion that all their readers will be buying, at new-book prices, all the ebooks they read. And they will all be novel-length or longer. This includes the handful of companies that *advertise* access to Google's 2 million free public domain works, and the ones who sell lots of short stories.

They are all confused at the idea of "I want to have 3000 tiny ebooks on my reader; how can I flip through them other than alphabetically 10 on a page?"

KINDLE is tied to Amazon's super-sleazoid ethics, and can't read epub, which is (1) carried by more places and (2) objectively, a more versatile/better format. (However. The "better" levels are pretty invisible for standard novels.) Kindle comes with a decent web browser (best, AFAIK, among e-ink readers), lots of upgrades, and Amazon nifties of various sorts.

NOOK has two entirely different devices, the e-ink and Nook Color. B&N wants you to think these are two versions of the same thing. I suppose they are, if you think a VW bug & VW bus are kinda the same thing with a few different features. I'm blurry on the exact advantages of either Nook (other than the e-ink being the only device that reads ereader PDB, which I love despite its obsolescence).

[taylorgibbs.livejournal.com]

The Nook Color is a LCD screen, closer visually to an Ipad rather than a 1st gen Nook.

[nessaancalime.livejournal.com]

Good point about everyone liking what they have :-)
To me the colour screen is actually a no-sell. If I wanted to tire my eyes with backlit screens for all my reading, I would just use a PC. And a backlit screen kills the battery so much faster.

[taylorgibbs.livejournal.com]

Its a slight negative to me too. I love the more "natural" look of the Kindle's/1st gen Nook's e ink.

[pslasher.livejournal.com]

lol about #2! I worried about getting an ereader so early on in the process, especially with format debates still going on, but decided that it would be worth it.

I went with the Kindle. I'm hoping that Amazon will eventually pick up the epub format, and maybe streamline the tagging/collection features. The web browser works well enough to read fics on the AO3 and LJ, so I'm happy with it. It's kind of slow, but I can handle it.

[elf]

I don't expect Amazon to ever pick up the epub format. Or at least, not in the next couple of years, and if they do, I don't expect them to issue firmware updates that work on the older devices; the base OS may not be that flexible. Amazon is big enough to push its walled-garden approach, and epub quality in other places isn't consistent enough to challenge that right now.

I'm certain they'll be working on the tag/collection features; mainstream, buy-them-all-new readers want those improved.

My daughter has a Kindle, and I can't pry her away from fanfiction.net long enough to load actual books on it. She's not interested in shippy fic, which makes most of AO3 useless to her. And she doesn't like how the headers for AO3 come out on the Kindle. But she loooooves fanfic on the ebook reader.

(And if you get tired of waiting for epub/library support, you can install Python and get the crack scripts to be able to convert DRM'd epubs so you can read them.)

[pslasher.livejournal.com]

Yeah, they can probably push the walled-garden thing for quite a while. But hopefully not forever. I figured that adding epub would be a simple firmware thing, what do you mean about the OS not being flexible enough?

Lol, well, to each her own! :)

Oooh, what is this Python/crack scripts thing? I'm not sure I'll install it because I don't want to 'interfere' with it being replaced if I need that, but I'm interested to hear about it.

[elf]

I don't know what kind of OS the Kindle has. (Linux something-or-other, I'm sure.) I don't know if the core system is flexible enough to add another ebook format--logic says it should be (epub is HTML in a zip file), but logic and code don't always meet. It's possible they couldn't add epub support without wiping out the whole system and starting over, meaning losing all one's listed books, bookmarks, notes, filing system and so on. And if that's what it takes, they'll offer it on newer devices and not upgrade the old ones; too many people would get confused/upset at losing their data.

The Magic Words to google for DRM removal are "skindle" (to remove Kindle DRM) and "mobidedrm" (for mobi books from other places) and [inept cabbages] for Adobe DRM. (Oh, and convertlit for .lit files, which are almost obsolete at this point.)

The "inept" system (by coder i♥cabbages, named after Adobe's "Adept" DRM) involves installing Python (possibly a specific version of Python) on your computer and running a script through it that will allow you to decrypt a DRM'd ADE ebook that you can normally read on your computer.

I don't know the details; I don't deal with DRM at all. There are veiled discussions at Mobileread about problem-fixing. It doesn't touch the Kindle at all; you use it to crack other books, and then would have to run them through a converter like Calibre to make them Kindle-able.

[pslasher.livejournal.com]

logic says it should be (epub is HTML in a zip file), but logic and code don't always meet. Trufax. Interesting info! You might be right that they'd only put it on a new device, but hopefully not.

That's good to know that it won't go on the Kindle - that makes me more inclined to investigate. Thanks so much for the info!