About 00mph

Recently i have been contemplating buying an eReader, as you would have guessed from my earlier posts (or the complete lack of posts) i am getting to a stage in life wherein its better and maybe more peaceful for me to divert my attention from life itself and the most constructive way to do so is to dive into the world of books…let me not expand on that and get straight to the topic on hand which is the ability to make the right choice.  I had obviously not donemuch research about the eReaders and had almost come to a decision that Kindle would be the right choice for me…now when i think about it guess it was mostly coz of the intensive advertising of the product on the net and also the launch of DX very recently. 

A few days back a cousin of mine told me that he had picked up a Sony eReader for his wife during one of his trips to London and that iswhen it occurred to me that there are other products that i should consider before a make a decision of buying somethingworth close to $400(with the case that i have in mind).  I read a little bit on the comparison between the 2 devices…some of these blogs with comparisons are highly technical and i was completely blown off but some of them were informative and made me aware of stuff like i would be unable to use the wireless service of Kindle outside the US and hence would have to resort to the regular way of plugging the device to my laptop and loading an eBook( exactly like the Sony eReader). Secondly the other restriction that i came to know about was that to buy a book from the Amazon eStore which Kindle accesses i necessarily need to have a credit card with a US billing address, which is strange to me but that is how it is.

The only drawback with Sony that i could understand from most of the reviews that i read was that it will not support DOC and hence it needs to be converted to RTF using a free converter called Caliber…all thats ok but now i wanna find out the format most eBooks are sold out in. The Sony eReader is almost &100 bucks cheaper as compared to the kindle, the screen size is the same, aesthetics look similar and with a couple of buttons here and there nobody seems to have a mjor problem with the placement of the menu items.  I have heard great reviews about Kindle’s battery life, still not read a lot about Sony on that front…that will surely be a factor to consider for somebody like me who wants to own an eReader for the convenience of not having to buy and carry bookloads with me. Its an ideal choice for people like me who have been moving from one corner of the world to the other, with the airline’s restrictions on baggage weight getting stricter day by day i have always had to leave my books behind, mostly distributing it among friends.

Any suggestions which would help me make this decision are more than welcome…i have a deadline of mid July to buy the eReader so please be kind enough to provide inputs before that.

Needed to edit this post just to clarify that reading the book on a 6″ display with the E Ink screen is am sure a completely different experience than reading it through the iphone App, i am sure abt that coz i personally own an iPhone and its not a great idea to read a book on a palm size display especially coz the battery keeps dyign out as the 3G iPhone has only a day long battery life as compared to the 4 day battery life of the older model. Had read about it as an alternative to eReader’s on a couple of blogs but wouldnt suggest anybody to go for it….nahh not a great idea.