Ebook Reader Suggestions?

I know the pain, Black Library eBooks are like 30 bucks.

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I used to. I still prefer books with pages but my ex and I moved and she had hundreds of books. I spent all day packing and hauling books with a decade's worth of dust on 95% of them. Never again..... SO, now I have just a small collection of books that will fit on a small bookshelf.

I buy and keep physical copies of my favorite books or books that are not available in digital form. Now that I have an ereader I won't go back to the old ways. 100's of pounds of paper and an entire wall's worth of space vs less than a pound of technology and the freedom to read almost any book at any time almost anywhere. Imagine sitting somewhere waiting for someone while being bored out of your mind. You now have access to over 90% of your reading collection.

Git that shit! Even if you just load up some books and keep it in the car for emergencies I would still label it as a solid investment.

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I will second this. There is nothing like holding the actual book in your hands and being able to turn the pages. It gives me a sense of accomplishment moving through the book versus not having anyidea what page I am on and only seeing what percentage of the book I have read. Plus there is nothing like the smell of a old classic, or a old used book store, E-readers just cant compete with that.

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Because the publishing industry is about the only thing that's more out of touch with the digital world than the movie or music industries. They tend to view ebooks as, well just another typical book, which is why they are priced almost the same. In essence it boils down to a) a huge misunderstanding of digital technology and b) a 'well they'll still pay it, so fuck em' attitude towards their customers.

I feel no shame whatsover pirating digital versions of books I have in hard copy. I'm not going to pay twice for something I already own.

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I don't normally condone pirating anything but when it comes to choosing to either pay 400.00 for a text book or pirate the thing, guess which one I will always choose. Especially when the current and required edition has not change from the last. Also I can't understand why digital books cost the same has a new hard copy.... that's just crazy.

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Thanks for all the replies!

I'm going to see how my Nexus 7 holds out and see if i can make it a better ereader.

I really hope something happens with colour eink displays, and better compatibility with pdfs. Its a bit of a downside. Its definitely better than a standard LCD screen for reading.

One of the reasons Im not to keen on the kindle is its tie to Amazon. Sure calibre can be used to convert books, but it feels kind of like using windows and trying to stop it doing windows things.

Makes no sense. The book corporations are in the same mindset as movie corporations, they dont get it. And see digital books as a way of milking money out of people. Got love for DRM and that 100% profit margin.

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I've got a Kobo Glo and despite being a couple of years old and does not have the newest e-ink screen with the sharpest contrast, it is still really good. This is subjective, but I don't think it needs more pixels and all that stuff to be a good enough e-reader.

Concerning .pdf, I have for a couple of years used a program called k2pdfopt, and it runs perfectly in WINE. I've tried them all and It's the only one I've found to have all the options I'd like + a preview window. I run about 120 pages from 10 different .pdf layouts through it every week and I never fail to make it just as I'd like within a couple of clicks. It'll not make it into an e-book format, it just makes the full size .pdf into a .pdf that'll fit your screen size. It does enlarge the file size quite a bit, but with a microSD card it is no problem at all. Just ask if you need any help with the program!

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I am a user of Kindle Paperlightt and it is awesome. With calibre you dont need Amazon cloud at all, the screen is top notch and battery holds on forever. I gave my old Kindle Keyboard to my mom and Kindle Touch (last gen) to girlfriend. Both of them did not even register their Kindles, since they do not speak nor read English and it works just fine with local e-book sources. I can't recommend it enough, it's pretty much the only tech gadget, that my mom finds no issue with.

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I ordered a kindle paperwhite early this week. Sunday, I think. The kindles have been on sale for $20 off for the past couple of days, leading me to pick one up since I have always wanted to catch up on books but didn't want to be time limited by the library and such. I didn't want a backlight since I'm staring at a regular monitor screen for hours on end already and the doctor says I have too much stress on my eyes.

$99 for the Kindle Paperwhite w/ Special offers.

No Prime. Supposed to ship out tomorrow. I'd estimate that it'll come in on saturday. I can find plenty of PDFs online so I figured I'd try it out. If I don't like it, Amazon's return policy is there and it's so damn hassle free.

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Be sure to share your experience with it. I do love my Kindle but am curious about other people using it.

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I totally forgot about this thread.

My Kindle Paperwhite did end up coming on Saturday. I had caught a small cold over the weekend, and ended up spending a lot of time binge reading in bed. I like it so far - enough that I'm going to keep it and buy a cover for it and such.

Hardware wise, it's really comfortable to hold. The rubberized back does get a lot of fingerprints, but the cheap cover/case I got today solves that issue and it's still comfortable to hold. It's much lighter and thinner than a book, as expected. What I really like about the Paperwhite compared to reading regular books is that I don't have to worry about accidentally dropping the book and losing my spot. I like to read in bed, and I used to drop my book all the time since I was so relaxed.

My paperwhite does have 4 areas on the bottom of the screen that are ever so slightly darker than the rest of the page. I believe this is a known issue, and is considered "regular". They have not really bothered me at all when reading, but I thought I should mention it anyways. The backlight itself is otherwise very uniform. It's quite a cool tone of white though. I personally would have liked a slightly warmer shade. My eyes are more comfortable when viewing the paperwhite under a warm light, as the grey-ish background looks much more like the page of a book under regular lighting than the LEDs of the paperwhite lighting up the page.

Screen sharpness is no issue. 300ppi is incredibly sharp and the words on the page look flawless.

My kindle did receive a new software update a day after I got it. Overall the UI seems relatively simple and smooth enough for something with an e-ink display. Definitely not meant for a lot of animated movement, though.

The native PDF reader is definitely not the best way of reading. The PDFs I had downloaded had pages with words that weren't big enough to read comfortably. Zooming in and panning around definitely wasn't optimal either. I tried Calibre and k2pdfopt which were useable, I guess. k2pdfopt spent quite a long time having to reflow and convert all the pages, and I found Calibre to be kind of cluttered and more than what I needed. I ended up opting to use amazon's e-mail convert method, where you just attach your PDFs and have the subject name as "Convert". The books automatically downloaded onto my Kindle a couple minutes later in AZW3 format. Really simple and easy, and the conversion seems to work surprisingly well(even removing most page numbers, unlike Calibre).

So overall, I'm quite happy with the device. I do find it a bit pricy, even at $100, but if you have the money and can catch it on a sale (camelcamelcamel.com is a godsend), I'd recommend it if you wanted an e-reader.