I’d been eye-balling e-book readers for my wife and finally cracked this year. She reads something like 100-150 pages an hour and the mess of old paperbacks was getting annoying. I got her a Kindle 2 after reading some much-improved reviews on the major 2nd-gen readers. 2 things tipped me towards the Kindle over the Sony reader.
1) Kindle is ready out-of-the-box. Wifey punched in her amazon account info and that was that. The Sony Reader requires a software installation and about an hours worth (plus or minus depending on computer savvy, of course) of configuring before it is in a usable state.
2) Kindle has free 3g wireless connectivity, limited to Amazon’s book store, but otherwise no strings attached. If you never want to plug the thing into a computer, you don’t have to. She is able to purchase and download books from anywhere that has wireless coverage.
Flu: The eye strain from reading “electronic ink” e-book readers is no different that of reading a normal hard copy. The display is not backlit, which is what causes eye strain when viewing an LCD for extended periods of time. You’ll need a well-lit area just the same as when you read a normal book. The trade-off for always needing an external light source is that the device uses barely any power and lasts for weeks without needing a recharge.
One other detail that doesn’t get much attention is that the Kindle 2 reads just about any format you can throw at it, and the ones it doesn’t read by default, Amazon has a free, automated system setup that will convert them for you via e-mail. Txt, pdf, whatever, and it doesn’t care what the source is. It behaves like a thumb drive: plug it in, copy the file, and then start reading. I can’t speak for the Sony Reader in that regard, but format compatibility was my main requirement before I’d consider reaching for my wallet.
