From The Past: June 11, 2008
* It doesn’t matter that Kevin is taking not one, but two master’s classes this summer.
* It doesn’t matter that he is writing pages upon pages of homework each day.
* It also doesn’t matter that he is teaching not one, but two classes online.
* No, it doesn’t matter that he is in the mist of home repairs and pool maintenance.
I still asked him to write a guest blog … and he did.
I hope you enjoy it 🙂
*****
From Kevin:
I really enjoy the Sony Reader I got for my birthday. It is cumbersome right at first but after 10 pages you ignore the device and just read. The contrast of the screen is excellent and I have not found any situations where I needed more light. The text is very clear and easy to read. There are 3 font size settings and I generally keep mine on small. MobileRead is an excellent website with tons of information on all the ereaders available.
If I had to purchase again, I would still buy the Sony Reader even with the recent price drop of the Amazon Kindle. If they had been the same price, the decision would become harder. I honestly think I would still buy the Sony. There are some great programs for the Sony that are not available on the Kindle such as library management and format converters.
I did quite a bit of research on both the Sony and Amazon’s Kindle before I purchased the Sony. I have not used a Kindle but the screen is the same so I would think the reading experience would be the same. I understand it has more font sizes but I am not sure how important that is. I read mostly from the public domain books so I will not purchase a majority of my books. With this in mind, I did not need the ability to shop and buy books from the device and have almost instant access to that book.
The Kindle also has search and dictionary functions which are nice but not worth the extra money. Also, if you are outside the US the current wireless browser options on the Kindle will not work for you. You can still use it and buy books but they will have to be synced through your PC.
The bottom line is, if you are a reader who enjoys browsing books and are willing to read just about anything then an ereader will work for you. On the other hand, if you only read specific authors or types of books you really need to check into the electronic versions of those books. Make sure they sell those books in a format that will work on your reader. Amazon and Sony both sell ebooks and honestly Amazon has more of them so if you plan to buy a ton of ebooks then you might want the Kindle instead of the Sony. Just check out the stores before you buy.
One last thing, the Kindle does not support PDF documents as of this reading (without converting) and the Sony does open PDF documents but very poorly. So if your hope is to carry around a bunch of PDF documents with pictures (such as technical manuals or textbooks) then I would NOT get either reader right now. The converters currently available do not convert formatting and pictures from PDF files very well. And there is no correlation between the electronic page number and the real page number so textbooks do not work since you are often asked to refer to a specific page which you cannot do with the electronics version.