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Not the most up to date or even best ereader in the world, but acceptable nonetheless, the Pandigital Novel 6” monochrome ereader is currently yours for a mere pittance at Amazon.
This pretty basic ereader has been reduced from its original price of $239.40 to $67.90 (how do they arrive at these strange prices) for a new one, or about $50 for a second-hand but good one.
If you want to try an ereader…..
A splendid ereader for people who are only interested in reading ebooks and nothing else.
The Kobo Touch Edition ereader is a very straight forward and honest ereader, with only those functions that an ereader needs, no fancy colour, 3G, can’t play MP3 files, and logically enough it doesn’t support Text to Speech either. But it is very good to read ebooks with, and that is its great strength. And as its name sort of gives away, it comes with a touch screen.
Currently Kobo ereaders hover just below the three market leaders in the world of ereaders, the Kindle series (the top sellers) the Nook from Barnes and Noble (but given the financial problems of Barnes and Noble, I don’t know how long the Nook will be with us) and the Sony ereaders. This means it is still a very good device, as there are about 500 other ereader models way below the Kobo in quality out there.
As with its more successful relatives, the Kobo Touch Edition has WiFi connectivity, so you can very easily connect to Kobo’s online ebook store to buy your ebooks, and should you not be able to find the ebook you want there, it also has an, albeit primitive, web browser so you can go to other online ebook sellers and find ebooks to buy there. So as is almost standard now for ereaders, you have no need for a computer to work with this ereader.
Further, not being from the Amazon private walled garden, it supports a whole range of ebook formats, thus enabling you to buy ebooks from an equally wide range of online shops and free ebook sites.
What more to be said?
Weltbild, a well known German publishing house and book seller has announced that they will be selling an extremely cheap ereader to be strongly in place when ereading actually happens in Germany.
In a statement on its website, publisher Weltbild announced that its eBook Reader 3.0, available from Thursday ( 13th October 2011) online, is just €60 – which puts it firmly among the cheapest ereaders currently available. And well below the cheapest Kindle available outside the USA which is currently what has become known as the Kindle 4, widely touted at $79, but actually costing nearer $ 130 outside the USA.
Weltbild have taken this step as they feel that ereading is the coming thing in Germany, and they want to ensure their place in that market place when it takes off. Curiously enough, just now, Germans seem to have been happily oblivious of ereading, and are among the least likely people to own an ereader. But Weltbild is convinced that this will change very soon.
As Weltbild Managing Director Carel Halff puts it: Read full story »
With cheap ereaders as with most things in life, you get what you pay for……….
I have written about cheap ereaders before on this blog, and I have no doubt I shall be doing so again in the future.
I get no end of emails from people who have purchased cheap ereaders, mostly from Supermarkets and cheap electronic goods shops, all asking for help solving a range of problems, mostly to do with getting DRM protected ebooks to work on their ereaders, and most of which are more or less impossible to solve, sadly.
The problem is that the buyers from large chains of cheap goods see an ereader advertised by its makers on one or other Chinese website, and buy in a few thousand of the things, print their own logo on the front, and bung it into their stores for prices ranging from about$50 to $ 90. Then publicize them in their junk mail pamphlets, describing them as the best electronic device for reading ebooks on since sliced bread came along (if you will forgive the mixed metaphor).
Sadly they are not the best thing……..
These ereaders are churned out by small factories in China at a great rate, there are literally hundreds of these factories doing this, and they all have one thing in common, they use the cheapest possible components. This results in batteries failing within a couple of months, screens that hardly work, and to make it even worse, they don’t worry too much about firmware (the software that makes the things work), so the hapless buyer of one of these devices finds themselves with a product that hardly functions as advertised.
Here is a brief oversight of a few ereaders that would appeal to your kids – I hope.
One of the most noticeable effects that the advent of ereaders has had is the increase in reading among those people who have purchased themselves an ereader – there seems to be something about ereaders that encourages people to go out and find – and read – loads more books than they did before. Seems to me the same would apply to kids as well.
So, the problem:
Does one go out and buy a serious ereader for one’s kids or are there ereaders that are actually made specifically for kids to read with?
Happily there are a few quite good ereaders being made for young children now, which have the qualities that they need – bright colours, easy navigation, a good supply of ebooks specifically aimed at young children, reasonably tough and generally fun to use.
These are mostly aimed at the age group of between 3 and 7, so everything about them is designed with this age group in mind, and I shall have a look at a few of the available models below.
For older kids, then you might well do best to buy them one of the “standard” ereaders, that are actually intended for adults to read with, as there is a huge number of children’s ebooks out there, both all the well loved Classics – which tend to be free – as well as new writings that are intended for young readers.
I shall suggest a couple of ereaders that I think would work for younger readers, i.e in the age range 8 to about 10. Thereafter, I reckon kids should be simply given the same ereaders as their parent use, so they can share ebooks and generally have and use all the various functions that ereaders intended for adults have as standard.
So, for the seriously young ones:
For ages 3 to 7.
Amazon Price: $49.00
Additional book cartridges sold separately costing about $12.
Looks more like a tablet PC and has more functionality in addition to reading.
Amazon Price: $99.99
Games and ebooks for this one cost between $12 and $20 each
Appropriate for children ages 4 to 9 years
Possibly the smallest ereader out there, the Aluratek Libre Air seems to be a small jewel of an ereader.
This latest ereader from Aluratek seems to combine just about all the qualities one might wish for in a highly portable ereader – works in bright light, it can store as many ebooks as you could reasonably wish, it has WiFi, it supports all the major ebook formats, including the Kindle one, it is a perfectly reasonably MP3 Player (via headphones), and has a number of rather neat tricks that are unique to this ereader, and it is not too expensive either.
All too good to be true?
Nope, it is true, so if you are looking for a dedicated reader that works in any situation, then this is definitely one for you to look at.
Display:
Lets look at it’s display to begin with, as this is an aspect of this ereader that is completely unique – as far as I know.
It has a rather small screen – 5-inch, 480-by-640-pixel – monochrome display, but the thing that is special is that it uses a reflective-light LCD that does not depend on backlighting and is therefore readable in bright sunlight. And because it’s an LCD, it’s more responsive (no wait or flicker between page turns) than the E Ink screens found in most e-readers. All the other back-lit LCD type ereader screens suffer from the serious problem of being terrible to use in bright sunlight, as any user of a laptop or iPad will tell you.
Further, not being back lit, the battery life of this ereader is much better than normal back-lit LCD screened ereaders, a matter of about 20 hours compared to the average of about 6 hours for the back-lit types.
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