A lot of us love reading. And a little less of us are eco-conscious. How good would it be, to mix these both passions? Well, if the number of e-book readers that are flooding the market are anything go by, Pretty damn good! You gotta appreciate the USP of e-book readers here. They serve a key demographic of consumers, They are eco-friendly, They make pursuing your hobbies very simple and the business value ain’t so ugly either.
Currently, the market has a lot of e-book readers. Here are some I came across: Kindle, Sony Reader, eSlick, BeBook. Amazon has even released an update to Kindle with a controversial “Text to Speech” feature that allows your reader to read a particular book out loud. Pretty nifty if you ask me, leaving the copyright infringement aside. You can even read e-books on your iPhone/iPod Touch. Which is my favourite by far.
Now, the problem with the whole thing is interoperability. There are as many e-book formats as there are e-book readers. And most of the time you can’t migrate your book collection to a new device or have multiple devices at the same time. There is one format though, ePub, which is an open format and most devices support it.
An avid reader needs to make an informed decision when he chooses a particular device and then a compatible format. If you buy books in epub format you can rest assured that 10 years from now, you won’t have to worry about how you can read the Harry Potter series again in the new generation devices. You are not locked into any proprietary format that might go extinct sometime in the future.
If you are in the United States, Buying a Kindle makes more sense as there is a lot of content available apart from books. People elsewhere might consider Sony Reader or some such depending on the availability of the device and compatible content. I, for one, use my iPod Touch for reading these days. Further, all the books I buy are readable on my computer albeit, by installing additional software.
For further info head to these links:
Some websites that allow you to buy e-Books:
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