At this point, I'd recommend *against* the Nook on capabilities, I'd recommend against the Kindle based on what formats it can handle, and I'd recommend against the Sony e-reader because Sony has habitually put spyware and lock-down ware on their consumer electronic devices.
If the Sony e-Reader does not have the usual Sony crap (wait three months to see if a storm of complaints shows up), it's the best technical device on the market.
None of these devices displays color, and all have merely 16-bit gray scale.
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Big thing to me is reading my Pathfinder rpgs pdfs without eyestrain :-)
Isn't going to happen on any of the current crop. It's impossible to view a PDF on such a small screen without either looking at a tiny box containing 10% of the page at a time (and waiting 1s for the screen to refresh every time you move the box) or reflowing the text. The result of reflowing is very variable, depending both on the device and how the PDF was created. Paizo could do a lot to improve this - there are hints that you can put into the PDF and they could remove the coloured background - but ebooks are currently a project for the future for them.
In 2010 some much larger eBook readers will hit the market, getting up to US Letter and A4 size. These will be much better for viewing PDFs and will probably cost about the same as a small principality in the Alps.
I'm also after an eReader for the same purpose and I've resigned myself to wait and see. The Plastic Logic stuff looks good, but is still in development, and the iRex DR1000 is a possible but is expensive. Hopefully as more competition comes along in that form factor, prices will drop.
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I'm not sure about the other readers, but my wife has a Kindle and she loves it. I've even made use of it once or twice, and found it to be not bad. The format, as mentioned above, isn't the greatest, but it's decent. And, I've heard that some of the newer ones can have the capability to view PDFs. Amazon also has a really big selection of stuff for the Kindle. You can also do the whole internet surfing, although I found it to be kind of awkward. Finally, I think I remember my wife saying the other day that Amazon was coming out with some kind of Kindle application for Blackberries.
Anyway, my two cents. Personally, I'll keep going with dead-tree books for as long as possible.
I've been watching e-readers for the same thing, my rpg PDF collection.
Right now, from what I understand of the e-reader market, the biggest obstacle is Paizo's PDFs.
Don't get me wrong. Their PDFs are high quality works of art. And that is the problem.
With the full color art and page backgrounds, the very thing cited for some customers complaints about PDF performance, are going to "murder" any reader's hardware.
If black and white, limited art, versions were available, it would likely be a different story.
Right now, your best bet is a netbook for performance - and even that will bog down on Paizo PDFs. (I have a couple Atom based computers with 2GB memory, and they can choke on the larger PDFs like the full Core rulebook, and Bestiary. I don't want to think about what the poor e-readers have to go through.)
Having said that, most of the e-readers claim PDF support and the eSlick comes from a company that made its' name on a PDF reader. Reading through the eSlicks specs, it even prefers PDFs (you have to convert many formats to PDF first). But I think most of the e-reader companies are thinking mostly black on white text images....
If you find a solution, let me know.
Well, if you looking at plunking down major money on an e-reader, maybe you'd consider spending a little more for a convertible touch netbook, like the ASUS Eee PC Touch T91. Certainly a lot more versatile than just an e-reader.
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I'd say wait and take a look at the Apple iTablet due this March.
It's going to run you twice the cost of a Kindle DX, but it is set to sport a 10+ inch full color, touch screen, with unfettered internet access, and the computing power of the Macbook Air. The latest leaks from S&S, RH, Viking, et al. are for ebooks in full color and at prices cheaper than Amazon (thanks to the pub houses getting a substantially better deal with Apple than they currently get with Amazon). Not to mention, Adobe PDF is native, and the entire device is about the same size and thickness as the Kindle DX.
and the computing power of the Macbook Air
Can you point to where you found this tidbit?
From what I have seen of the iTablet is speculation that it will fall somewhere between an iPhone and a Macbook.
If it can match a Macbook Air (~2GHhz Core 2 Duo, w/2GB ram) that will change my opinion on the iTablet and make it worth the price.
The thing to recall is that most ereader file formats, such as .epub or .azw, are basically webpages with a small, file specific css file and any art assets, contained in an archive file. You can open an epub file with any program capable of extracting zip files and see what I mean.
The current group is absolutely not optimized to view PDFs, especially pdfs with full page art, multiple column layout or multi-part tables.
That said, it is possible to distill an .epub file out of InDesign, you are just going to lose something in the translation.
The best reader I've seen yet is the free LexStanza app for the ipod touch and iphone, probably because it is an addition to a feature rich device, rather than a device with a massive lack of features (and lousy ergonomics).
Also, I'm an EeePC cheerleader. Most any PDF under 60 mb loads fine on my first generation EeePC, I'm sure the newer models are even better (and have a larger screen!).
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and the computing power of the Macbook AirCan you point to where you found this tidbit?
From what I have seen of the iTablet is speculation that it will fall somewhere between an iPhone and a Macbook.
If it can match a Macbook Air (~2GHhz Core 2 Duo, w/2GB ram) that will change my opinion on the iTablet and make it worth the price.
This comes from several interviews with Oppenheimer and Ives; I'll try to find a couple links from YouTube when I get home tonight.
I should have been more clear: when I write that the iTablet (and that's not the actual product name) has the computing power of the Macbook Air, that's as measured in device capability rather than number of cores or parallel threads--there are currently no commercially-available chipsets capable of sustained and maximized processing in a device as small as the tablet and actually running at Macbook specs. Even slowing them down, the device would burn up in no time. However, running its own tablet version of OS X, and utilizing the new 45nm chips, you would notice no difference in apparent computing power between a Macbook Air and the tablet. An example of how Apple achieves this is evident in Snow Leopard, which has a significantly smaller footprint than Leopard did, yet runs 64-bit and enjoys substantially greater transactions per operation.
Bottom line: don't expect to see multicore processors in a tablet (yet!), but do expect to enjoy no apparent difference in processing a PDF or opening a PowerPoint file on a Macbook Air vs Apple tablet.
Ah. Then I don't need any links, thank you.
That is pretty much what I expected.
I won't dispute the appearance of computing power, but when it comes to PDFs they push most hardware to the limits. I'm very curious how the Apple product - whatever it will be called - handles them.
At some point, there will be an e-book reader that's optimized for PDF display, has an 8.5x11" form factor, a touch screen and a color e-Ink display; it'll also handle web surfing via intermittent WiFi. (One of those cases where it automatically turns off the WiFi radio after each download).
I don't expect to see it before 2011, though. And I suspect it will be a natural outgrowth of the Cedar Trail CPU from Intel, rather than an ARM based chipset.
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I have a first generation Kindle. I love it. It has no PDF support, which is sad, but I still love it. When I can afford the second generation of the Kindle DX (which I expect to see next year) I will be much happier so that I can read my gaming PDFs, until then my gaming books are physical everything else is digital.
