Great Devices for Reading eBooks

Amazon's recent announcement of a price drop in their Kindle eBook reader to $359 has left me a little shocked, to be honest. For one thing, this is perhaps 10% off the original price, which is hardly the vast decrease they make it out to be. Secondly, given the amount they still expect you to pay, I'm amazed that anyone actually purchases one of these. There's so many other pieces of hardware you could pick up for far less that you can read eBooks on, and do more besides. You could pick up a perfectly good laptop for that price for instance, but it's not going to be quite as portable.

There are however several devices which are.

Being a big fan of eBooks, I've owned several of these over the years, and here are a few I would highly recommend.

Psion series 5mx (Current prices on eBay: ~$100-150)

The first of the Psion series that I actually owned, this is a remarkable little device. Folding up to about the size of a whiskey flask, the clamshell design allows for a small but broad black and white touch sensitive LCD screen, and an honest attempt at a keyboard; I was able to get a reasonable typing speed on one of these on a flat surface. The screen can be backlit, and offers excellent resolution. The 5Mx comes with 8Mb of onboard flash RAM for storage, and a smartcard slot for extra space makes expanding easy; I commonly used a 1Gb flash drive in there, and given the average eBook is rarely above 1Mb in size, that's a lot of bookspace. The 5mx runs on 2 AA batteries for many hours, and is easily connectible to a PC for file transfer and backup. It's capable, with the right free software (available all over the Internet) of reading almost any format of eBook you can think of; PDF, TXT, PDB, HTML, and so on. And, of course, there's hundreds of other kinds of software you can run on it; anything you'd expect from a PDA, in fact, as well as a full word processing suite compatible with Microsoft Word.

If you're wanting something a little cheaper, the Psion Revo is essentially the same machine, a little smaller, less memory, and a slightly less comfortable keyboard. Bear this in mind when shopping around, they're otherwise essentially identical.

If it has a fault, it's rather fragile, relatively speaking. My first 5mx broke when I dropped it from a height of about 8 feet; the second unaccountably stopped working when someone knocked a full cappuccino into its innards. But then, I see no guarantees that the Kindle is coffee-proof either.

After this second tragedy, I upgraded to...

Psion Series 7 (Current prices on eBay: ~$175)

Effectively the last PDA Psion produced, this is the 5mx on steroids. Coming in at around the size and weight of a hardback book, this PDA has exactly the same operating system as the 5mx (Symbian OS, the same as found in many modern mobile phones), with a beefed up processor. It also boasts a 10" touch sensitive, full colour 7.7" LCD screen, and what amounts to a full sized keyboard the envy of many laptops.

I've owned one of these for about 3 years, and it hasn't given me a day's trouble. It's also still my weapon of choice for reading any eBook. You can sit with it on your knee and comfortably browse. You can lie in bed and prop it on your chest and read before sleeping; hands-free, backlit, large screen reading! Battery life is about 8 hours of continuous use on a full charge, which is roughly four times what you'd get from a laptop.

It's also a lot more sturdy than the 5mx. The exterior is even leather bound. Leather bound! How many PDAs or laptops do you see with that?

I also own...

Palm Zire 21 (Current Prices on eBay: ~$25)

This is pretty much the cheapest PDA Palm have ever produced, and it shows. But, if you're on a budget, you're not going to get something capable of reading an eBook for much less. A tiny little device, easily slipped into a shirt pocket, with a touchscreen, black and white LCD screen. No backlight here, so you're only going to be reading during the day, but this also means the battery charge can last you all week.

I found this an excellent stealth reader - I worked in a call center where they didn't allow you to have books on your desk for 3 years, but diaries and appointment trackers were tolerated. Since nobody in upper management appeared to have a clue what a PDA was capable of, this meant I was able to sneakily read whole novels between calls without arousing the slightest suspicion.

There are many other palms on the market, prices vary as much as the features do. My wife recommends...

Palm Tungsten T5 (Current prices on eBay: ~$100)

A bit pricier, but with the advantage of a full colour, backlit screen. As I said, shop around the palms, but bear in mind even the oldest is perfectly capable of reading eBooks.

To conclude, you can probably see now why I find the current price of the Kindle a little scandalous. For a one-trick machine, it's exorbitant, even if Amazon's marketing department whispers sexy words like 'wifi' and 'ePaper'. Shop around a little, and you should be able to get so much more for so much less.