I live in a country where name-brand E-book readers are quite rare. I am aware of E-Book readers for quite some time, but I am unsure if I can justify buying one, because of
a) non-existent electronic bookstore support. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Sony and such doesn’t work here officially. Will E-book reader provide enough value if I will only download books to it manually? I heard it doesn’t handle pdf format well?
b) uncertain reliability of the e-ink devices. My only experience with it is when my brother borrowed a PocketBook reader for a day and it broke, somehow. He never even took it out of its leather case. Looks like those e-ink screens are very fragile? Or, maybe that’s only true for some? I was thinking of buying a Sony Reader, which had metal cases, but they changed for plastic in the latest generation.
I loaded up almost a hundred books to my Kindle from Project Gutenberg. There are other free (legal) eBook locations such as Baen Free Library. For the $80 Kindle, that’s likely worth it, even without accessing the vast illegal (in the US at least) sources. I agree they’re definitely bad for PDF, text books, or anything else you’ll want to flip back and forth; only good for sequential reading (novels and the like). They’re very reliable and last a long time.
Specific advice would be much appreciated.
I live in a country where name-brand E-book readers are quite rare. I am aware of E-Book readers for quite some time, but I am unsure if I can justify buying one, because of
a) non-existent electronic bookstore support. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Sony and such doesn’t work here officially. Will E-book reader provide enough value if I will only download books to it manually? I heard it doesn’t handle pdf format well?
b) uncertain reliability of the e-ink devices. My only experience with it is when my brother borrowed a PocketBook reader for a day and it broke, somehow. He never even took it out of its leather case. Looks like those e-ink screens are very fragile? Or, maybe that’s only true for some? I was thinking of buying a Sony Reader, which had metal cases, but they changed for plastic in the latest generation.
Any thoughts on this?
I loaded up almost a hundred books to my Kindle from Project Gutenberg. There are other free (legal) eBook locations such as Baen Free Library. For the $80 Kindle, that’s likely worth it, even without accessing the vast illegal (in the US at least) sources. I agree they’re definitely bad for PDF, text books, or anything else you’ll want to flip back and forth; only good for sequential reading (novels and the like). They’re very reliable and last a long time.