E-readers give you your own portable library, with unlimited access to thousands of books and newspapers which you can store and download in seconds.
Next week, Amazon’s Kindle becomes available to UK customers, priced at £175. Already the Kindle has won rave reviews. The Times, for example, praises its user-friendliness and says the 6in display screen was the best it tested. The Kindle gives access to some 350,000 volumes, including newspapers and magazines, via a mobile phone connection.
It’s not perfect – you will only be able to buy books from the UK, and have to pay shipping and import costs of over £40. Equally, the British version lacks the wider web access of its US counterpart, although Amazon says it is working on this.
There has also been acclaim for the Sony Reader Touch Edition PRS-600, pricier at £250. It’s the first e-reader to have a touchscreen, so you can flick through the pages as you would a regular book. There’s also a stylus for adding handwritten notes to the pages.
The product has been praised for its attractive font, making the screen easy to read. But, to download books, it needs to be hooked up to a PC.
The debate about whether e-readers will sound a death knell to ‘proper’ books has kept the blogosphere buzzing. A chief complaint seems to be that you can’t use these devices in the bath, (then again, try reading a paper volume which has been dropped in the tub).
In truth, no-one really knows yet the effect these readers will have on the publishing industry. But given that there will always be those who prefer the smell of real ink and the feel of real paper, reports of the Death of Books would appear greatly exaggerated.
Image: Flickr
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