Three years ago this month Amazon unveiled its groundbreaking Kindle e-reader. The original Kindle featured a 6-by-4-inch grayscale screen, could hold approximately 200 titles, retailed for about $400 and—since it was the only device of its kind on the market—sold out a projected five months’ worth of stock in a little over five hours. Holiday shoppers who weren’t on top of their game had to wait until April of the following year to get their hands on the coveted contraption.
This season Amazon’s reader is finally facing some stiff competition as the go-to gift for your favorite bibliophile—from Barnes & Noble and Sony, which have both released their own models, and from a profusion of cheap knock-offs as well as a cadre of crossover tablets that do a whole lot more than present novels. With so many options to choose from, a person in the market for an e-reader likely won’t be banished to the end of a long waiting list, but the decision will be a tougher one to make.
Giving the gift of literature these days is slightly more complicated. It requires an inquiry in to the reader’s needs and habits. Is the giftee, for example, known to consume a fat stack of novels or multiple tomes of nonfiction whilst on extended vacations in the tropics? Then any one of the current class of e-readers—the Kindle, Barnes & Noble’s Nook or any of three available Sony Readers—would be a fine choice. Each utilizes E-Ink, technology that replicates the experience of reading a printed page so that even in daylight, words appear as clear as, well, day. E-Ink uses very little power (each of the aforementioned models can provide nearly a month of reading with a single charge) and is easy on the eyes (literally; it’s a much more gentle experience than staring at a backlit screen).
That said, E-Ink has its limitations: it can’t reproduce color, meaning that children’s books, cookbooks, and comic…er, graphic novels are out, and the experience of reading most magazines is severely impaired. E-Ink also updates very slowly, so it’s not the choice for multimedia consumption or surfing the web.
Tablets, meanwhile, are ideally suited to precisely these purposes. Apple’s iPad has been called the savior of the ailing magazine industry for the possibilities it affords. When reading a magazine about automobiles on an iPad, for instance, one will be able to rotate a 3D image of the car 360 degrees, change its color and zoom in for in-depth information about certain features; theoretically the same will go for clothes in Vogue or a game-winning play in Sports Illustrated. Additionally, with tablets it’s possible store photos, watch movies, listen to music, surf the web, read e-mail and access thousands of apps of all kinds—games, guides and oh yeah, books, downloadable via iBooks, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and others.
There are a slew of tableaders and e-readlets available—some pretty good (Sony’s Reader, Touch and Daily editions) and others prohibitively expensive and pretty terrible (HP’s Slate)—but these four represent the best of their respective genres.
Kindle
Today’s Kindle can hold 3,500 books, and while it still features a 6-inch black and white screen, the newest model’s screen has considerably higher contrast than previous versions. Even with the increase in competition, the Kindle retains some considerable advantages over its rivals: it has a very polished, user-friendly interface, and because it is an Amazon product, there are hundreds of thousands of titles available (725,000, according to the company). That said, the Kindle can only process material purchased through Amazon, and rates hover around $10 per book. Some Kindle users gripe that books they have downloaded have typos that seem to be the result of scanning errors, but by and large it has far fewer reported errors than other available readers. While most readers on the market have the capability to process purchased audiobooks, the Kindle has text-to-speech capability, so it can read any selected book aloud. It is one-third of an inch thick, weighs about 9 ounces and costs $139 ($189 for the 3G enabled model, which makes it possible to download books even when out of reach of a wireless network).
Nook/NookColor
Barnes & Nobel’s reader, called the Nook, is available in two versions: the original black and white version and the NookColor, released just this month. The original Nook features two screens—a larger, 6-inch screen on which book pages are displayed, and a smaller touch screen below for navigation. In addition to the more than 2 million titles Barnes & Nobles boasts are available on the device, the Nook (unlike the Kindle) is open source. That means it’s compatible with third party publishing formats like ePub, and it means you can bring a Nook into your local library and load it up with all kinds of books for free.
The new NookColor features a 7-inch backlit LCD touch screen. In addition to being the only color reader currently available, it is also the only reader with a touch screen, making it kind of a combination tablet and e-reader. While the color screen makes it possible to read magazines and picture books, because it is LCD rather than E-Ink, it reduces the device’s battery life significantly—NookColor lasts 8 hours compared to Nook’s 10 days. In addition to possessing all the functionality of the original black and white version, the NookColor can also read Word and Excel documents, surf the web, play movies and music and run Android apps from the Barnes and Noble store. It has the capacity to hold 6,000 books compared to the Nook’s 1,500, and retails for $249, while the Nook goes for $149.
iPad
The iPad is a gorgeous, swoon-worthy, even product. Its giant, 9.7-inch crystal-clear display and super-fast 1-Ghz A4 processor make it the perfect medium for watching movies, surfing the web and reading magazines and newspapers (in app form). Strictly speaking of its functionality as a book reader, the backlit screen is slightly harsher on the eyes than an E-Ink device, and while the Kindle and Nook both include a 3G subscription free with purchase, access to 3G on the iPad (and every other tablet) requires an additional subscription fee. Weighing in at 1.5 pounds, it has more heft to it than a reader, but it could hardly be considered bulky. The iPad’s beauty comes at a price, though—and not just the literal one ($499 for the low-end version, $829 for the high). In order to maintain the device’s sleek design, Apple was forced to make some sacrifices, most notably in the connectivity department. The iPad has a single port, the power dock, which means uploading photos from a camera, documents from a flash drive, music or anything else from an external hard-drive can only be done one at a time, using cumbersome adapters called dongles. As a media-consuming device, though, that is where the complaints end.
Galaxy Tab
The other very impressive tablet on the market is Samsung’s Galaxy. While it features a smaller (7-inch) LCD touch screen and weighs less, it retains some significant advantages over the lordly iPad. Like the Kindle, the iPad suffers because it operates on closed format—it will only run apps approved by Apple. The Galaxy Tab (like the Nook) uses an open-source Android operating system, so in theory, users will ultimately have access to more applications. The Android operating system also allows the Galaxy to run Flash, which iPads (like iPhones) are not equipped to do. Today the Galaxy retails for $599 at Best Buy (that figure doesn’t include a $50-a-month 3G data plan), but according to a leak reported by PC Magazine, there will be big Black Friday deals on the device—Radio Shack, Office Max and Best Buy will all have them for $349 plus a two-year Sprint data plan.
