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Last week, Amazon finally released its digital ebook, the Kindle, for sale to Ireland and Europe. At the same time, Sony has launched its latest e-book device, called the Pocket Reader. As the Christmas market looms, which device is worth spending your money on? Here is a guide to compare the strengths and weaknesses of each device.
1. Design and usability
The Kindle is not an elegant device. On first impression, it looks like a cross between a Fisher-Price children’s toy and a waiter’s e-pad.
The placement of an entire Qwerty keyboard on the front beside the screen attracts attention away from the words on the screen, which is supposed to be the main focus. Because the device’s five-inch screen takes up less than half of the tablet’s ten-inch cover, the screen looks disproportionately small.
It’s a little like putting a small paperback page against a very large hardback background: it doesn’t look right.
By contrast, the Sony Reader lets the screen expand as far as possible on the front of the tablet.
This means that all of one’s attention is drawn to the script, and not the buttons.
Turning pages on both devices is a similar affair, although the Kindle places the buttons in a slightly unintuitive place. The Reader has simple arrow buttons on either side of the screen.
In the brief time I had the Kindle, I also found that it was a little unintuitive in mixing up ‘home’ and ‘menu’ buttons. An iPod-like system, with one button less, would work a lot better.
In fairness to Amazon’s device, the Kindle does a lot more than the Reader, being able to connect online and download magazines and newspapers.
Still, it’s a less elegant machine to look at and use than the Reader.
Winner: PocketReader
2. Buying books
The Kindle’s ability to go straight into Amazon’s webstore is a huge advantage over any of its rivals. It allows for purchasing decisions based on someone’s mood at any given time – in other words, exactly the same basis as buying a real book.
By contrast, the Reader needs a computer (probably back at home) and cabling. By the time you get around to it, you’ll probably have lost your enthusiasm. And it’s not just over wi-fi that the Kindle works: it has a sim-card built in, which works in 100 countries.
Don’t worry about roaming charges, either: it doesn’t matter where or when you use the device, thanks to a deal between Amazon, AT&T and European mobile carriers.
Winner: Kindle
3. Range of books available
In terms of one store to buy from direct, the Kindle is well ahead of the Reader. At the last count, the number of books you could buy directly from Amazon’s Kindle store stood at over 250,000 (in the US, it is over 300,000).
That is streets ahead of any rival stores for rival devices, including the Reader, which has less than 20,000 titles in its online Sony Reader Store.
In effect, Amazon has become the iTunes of digital books, creating a massive lead in the digital format. As a result, all publishers want to get a piece of the action. Of the top 100 New York Times bestseller books (the list that Amazon uses as its guide), 94 of them are also available as Kindle downloads.
In addition to Amazon direct, the Kindle can translate simple text files into its own digital format for the Kindle.
This means that resources such as the Gutenberg Project (www.gutenberg.org), which has over 20,000 free novels available – including most of the classics, which are out of copyright – can effectively be mined for additional material.
Sony, on the other hand, has three principal sources for ebooks.
The first is the Sony Reader Store (ebookstore.so ny.com). This works perfectly well (although you need to download from a computer before you transfer to the Reader device).
However, its range of books is far smaller than Amazon, with fewer than 20,000 titles available. The Reader’s second port of call is Waterstone’s online store (waterstone. co.uk). With about 10,000 titles, the download experience is far from perfect.
Lastly, the Reader can mine free book resources, such as the Gutenberg Project, for copyright-free classics.
Winner: Kindle
4. Flexibility and adaptability
Presuming that e-books are the thing of the future, we can expect to see a lot more online stores cropping up. Most of them will seek to use a standardised file format, probably the open-source ePub format. In this regard, the Reader beats the Kindle hands down.
Although the Kindle has more titles available, it will only allow those e-books to be downloaded in Amazon’s own file format. In other words, you cannot view your Amazon ebook on any other device (except for an iPhone under certain terms and conditions).
Sony, having tried this with its Walkman MP3 line, has balked at such an approach, meaning you can read items downloaded for your Reader on other devices, if you wish.
Sony has also made its Reader devices compatible with a massive range of file formats, including PDFs, Microsoft Word, simple text files and the open-source ePub format, which makes it compatible with any online book store (other than Amazon).
Winner: PocketReader
5. Space and capacity
The Kindle can hold up to 1,500 books on its 2GB hard drive, which should be enough to get anyone started. If that limit is reached, books can be removed from the device but stay in the purchaser’s Kindle account, or can be transferred to another Kindle device.
However, the device cannot accept external memory cards Then again, neither can the Pocket Reader – a curious omission, given its lesser 512MB on-board memory, enough to store 500 books.
Winner: Kindle
6 . Pricing
For Americans, the Kindle is reasonably good value, at $260 (about €180). Unfortunately, Amazon has chosen a route to the Irish market that does not include any Irish or European distributor. That means the intervention of Customs and Excise every time a Kindle is shipped to Ireland – so the total price, including delivery and customs, rises to €235.
This makes it slightly pricier than the Sony Pocket Reader, which retails for €200, and can be picked up in shops such as Eason and Peats.
Winner: Pocket Reader
