UK Kindle and E-Books...

Apparantly Asus are planning to do with ebooks what they did with the eee, by making a cut price version with a sub $100 price tag.

If there's any truth to it then i won't be touching ebook readers for a while, i think they're too expensive, especially when the ebooks themselves are the same price as a paper version, i'd be shelling out hundreds of extra pounds and not really getting a whole lot back.

Maybe when they drop to £50-75.
 
That's great news re the Essex libraries :)
Hopefully Bedfordshire will be doing it soon as well, my dad is loving his reader but he's starting to run low on new books for it.

Aye Chimaera, I've heard about Asus, however I doubt they'll get the price down very low for a while, as the displays are still very expensive and in limited supply.
I believe other companies/hardware are starting to use mini eink displays for things like storage use indicators now, which will be eating into the production (unless they are able to use "offcuts" from the manufacturing run/parts of displays that have a fault preventing them using it for larger units), although I think the main company making the displays has been bought up/had a lot of investment recently so hopefully will be able to start making more displays cheaply.
 
topbanana said:
Can you put your own PDFs on the Kindle?
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yep. set yourself up with a [email protected] address on your kindle home page, and email your pdfs to that.

the converted pdf gets emailed back to your registered address. (edit: alternatively, you can have it delivered over whispernet straight to your device, but that costs something like 99c per mb)

works very well for most, but there are alternative methods (apparently).

doesn't work for password-protected pdfs though, I have some APress pdfs and they can't be converted. Ironically, the apress kindle books are cheaper on the kindle site so I won't be using apress again anytime soon.
 
Just to chip in, I have had a Sony PRS-600 for a couple of months now and I love it. Its one of the best gadgets I have bought in recent years, got a few ORiely C# books on there and wizzed through a few Peter F Hamilton novels with a couple more lined up next.

Great buy, my only issue is a slight lack on constrast from the eink page, I'm sure that'll be sorted in future revisions with an increasingly whiter background.
 
Talon said:
Just to chip in, I have had a Sony PRS-600 for a couple of months now and I love it. Its one of the best gadgets I have bought in recent years, got a few ORiely C# books on there and wizzed through a few Peter F Hamilton novels with a couple more lined up next.

Great buy, my only issue is a slight lack on constrast from the eink page, I'm sure that'll be sorted in future revisions with an increasingly whiter background.
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Not to put a downer on your purchase, but part of the problem will be down to the reflective touchscreen layer Sony have on the PRS-600, for quality of reading experience the PRS-505 is still the better option.
 
Spit said:
The Sony 600 comes with a pen so you can annotate your books.

I can't see how you can get a headache with a proper e ink screen. I can read my ebook for hours but I get a headache after half hour on my laptop.
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The 600 annotation is slow, partly because of the CPU and partly because of the eInk screen.

The 600 has a larger screen but it's impacted by the pressure sensitive touch display - it's not the same clarity as an iPhone/Touch by a long shot. You do have to get the screen at the right light level too because it's shiny.

I just wish they'd get better PDF rendering, such as a zoom that stays for each page so you can remove the boarders that result in smaller text. Also the integration between the Sony eBook program and Adobe Digital Editions is a load of pap. I just want one program to the user regardless of the number of technologies being used.
 
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eggyoke said:
Are the Sony's compatible with manga and jpg images? Thinking of getting one for xmas
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They'll take them, but in terms of picture it's not really readable unless zoomed in (it won't display a full page at a readable size at once) :(
If I remember I'll try and take a shot of my 505 tomorrow or more likely Friday (I doubt i'll get a chance tomorrow).
 
NickK said:
The 600 annotation is slow, partly because of the CPU and partly because of the eInk screen.

The 600 has a larger screen but it's impacted by the pressure sensitive touch display - it's not the same clarity as an iPhone/Touch by a long shot. You do have to get the screen at the right light level too because it's shiny.

I just wish they'd get better PDF rendering, such as a zoom that stays for each page so you can remove the boarders that result in smaller text. Also the integration between the Sony eBook program and Adobe Digital Editions is a load of pap. I just want one program to the user regardless of the number of technologies being used.
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You could say the same about that with mp3 players though. There will always be one or two companies that insist on their own proprietary software.
 
Not to put a downer on your purchase, but part of the problem will be down to the reflective touchscreen layer Sony have on the PRS-600, for quality of reading experience the PRS-505 is still the better option.
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I disagree, the touch screen layer is slightly reflective but it doesn't cause a serious problem, the contrast between the background in the text is was I refered to and this is as far as i can see not a lot different to the 505, I much prefer the touch features that come with the 600 and the general look and feel of it.
 
Been considering one of these for a while. But I have a few questions:

1)Sony and Kindle seem to be thrown around a lot, are there plenty of generic ones around? Also Samsung model planned? (In korea, would likely be dirt cheap!)

2)I see the consistency issue mentioned a lot (i.e. having to re-size every page instead of it staying the same for each page once u change it.) Is this common to most models? What models don't have this problem? Is there a technical term I should be looking for when reading the spec with regards to this?

3)Can basically all models take on board pdf's easily? Im not remotely interested in novels but lots of textbooks.

Thanks!
 
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