I started using Calibre about the same time I started reading ebooks, so where ever Calibre stores stuff, is the only copy I have, and because I don’t really look into it’s storage, I don’t mind it’s naming scheme. I can imagine it might get annoying if you already have a system however. (My music is filed and tagged ‘by hand’, and I couldn’t put up with any application that tried to mess with my system).
It’s not like ebooks are that big to begin with. At around a meg each, even if you have more than one copy it’s barely noticeable on today’s HDs. mp3 files are larger.
The last three Kindles have been announced in September, so that’s when the new one should come out.
FDTD gcd FD
September should be the date!
Well, I don’t have many mp3 files, and I’m trying to identify and clear up duplicates and convert files and clear up space to add a Linux partition.
Any 10 inch tablet with high pixel density (eg ipad3) will work pretty well for pdfs. The kindle dx is still monochrome, even if does work in sunlight,
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Hm, I read .pdfs on my Kindle Paperwhite - it can’t show color pics and graphics, obviously, but it works fine for reading them. My main complaint is that it auto-detects the file name and author, which doesn’t always come through correctly, so I have a bunch of things that list me as the author with messy underscores in the title, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to re-name things either on the device or via “manage my Kindle” online.
I initially bought into e-readers with a Sony PRS-505 about 5 years ago. Of all the readers I’ve owned, this one had the nicest case, being a light metal one. It felt like a professional product. When that developed a mystery screen crack, I bought a Kindle Keyboard 3G.
My Kindle Keyboard 3G finally died in January this year (one day it went to sleep and never woke up). Initially I looked into buying a Paperwhite as a replacement, but the new one wasn’t immediately available so I took the opportunity to break out of the Amazon walled garden by buying a Kobo Aura HD.
The first one I bought broke on the first day. The screen was additive, not refreshing, quickly resulting in unreadable text.
I took it back the next day and got a replacement.
The second one lasted a month before developing a screen fault whereby the first line of every page was a solid black line.
My third one lasted 5 months, then refused to wake up one day. In taking it out of its very sturdy hemp case to reset it, I must have put a thumb on the screen and it developed the classic e-ink cracked screen display. This was not excessive pressure.
I’ve since abandoned that device in disgust and have now moved on to a Nook Simple Touch Glowlight.
This device is a lot sturdier, although the UI and screen quality are nowhere near as good as the Kobo.
From my experiences, these are my current thoughts on e-readers:
1: I absolutely cannot live without one. They save space in my flat and are incredibly portable and readable. Some people may think it’s a bit sad, but I simply don’t buy paper books any more (apart from trade paperbacks). E-books suit my lifestyle more.
2: While I hate their closed ecosystem, Amazon do make the best all-round devices, being tough and having high quality screens. However, their lack of epub support and the hassle of converting epubs to mobis means I’ll be staying away from them. Plus, I feel guilty about supporting Amazon these days.
3: Build quality and durability concerns aside, the Kobo Aura HD had the best quality screen and UI I’ve ever seen on an ereader, and their open approach to development and format support made me more responsible with my personal ebook library. If it wasn’t for Kobo, I would still be relying on Amazon to keep my library.
These days, I host a Calibre managed library on my Google drive, giving me full control over its availability. I’m even toying with the idea of moving to an open source cloud storage solution. So thanks Kobo for forcing me to adopt a better method of managing my library.
4: Kobo is the only reader that by default, without rooting it, displays the cover of the book you’re currently reading when in sleep mode. It sounds stupid, but this is a huge quality of life improvement when using an e-reader.
5: Nook is no-nonsense, cheap enough to be “disposable” (you’re not going to be as put out if the screen breaks on such a cheap device) and supports a wide range of formats, including epub. It’s also a very rugged device, and is the first e-reader I’ve bought that I haven’t felt the need to buy a case for.
6: Physical buttons win out over touch screen interfaces for e-reader devices. Adopting the tablet control paradigm to e-readers simply because they’re similar in form-factor was just a bad decision. Kobo is the worst device for this, with no physical buttons at all aside from the sleep switch. Touch screens can and do result in inadvertent page turns, resulting in you losing your place in the book you’re currently reading.
7: Nook has a really nasty policy of hiding epubs you buy from their store on an inaccessible partition that you can only gain access to by rooting the device, meaning you can’t back-up books you buy directly from Nook. This is awful, and I’ve only just discovered it.
I initially bought Charlie Stross’ The Rhesus Chart from Amazon (that’s where it was cheapest when checking through the built in browser in Calibre), but when I converted it to epub in Calibre, it borked and turned every paragraph into a page, resulting in an epub with 2450 pages. Begrudgingly, I bought the epub version directly from Nook; I didn’t mind buying the book twice too much as I absolutely adore the Laundry series and more money for Charlie’s a good thing in my eyes.
When I went to add the epub to my Calibre library, I discovered it wasn’t on the main memory of the device. That’s when a little digging online revealed the existence of this nasty hidden partition.
So in summary, no e-reader is perfect in my experience. I suspect my woes with the Kobo were down to them using a high res screen that Amazon chose not to use in their latest range of Kindles. That’s why the latest Paperwhite took so long to come out and why Aura HD pipped them to the post.
Amazon’s devices are fantastic, but their policies and walled garden approach are unacceptable.
Nook seemed a good compromise, but I find the use of a hidden partition preventing users from backing up ebooks they’ve bought to be reprehensible. It’s making me seriously consider buying a new device very soon. At the very least, I won’t be buying any more books through Nook.
And the best thing I’ve discovered?
Calibre is awesome.
It’s incredibly powerful, can strip DRM, allows me to share my library across multiple devices and allows for quick and easy editing of metadata. Plus, it’s updated on a weekly basis.
If anyone has a recommendation for another e-reader, I’m open to suggestions 
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Nice writeup. Your point 4 change my worldview. This should be standard on everything.
I wish I could share your passion for Calibre though.
Maybe I’m biased against it because I only use it in frustrating contexts (trying to convert nice clean epub files into kindle-readable mobi without mysteriously screwing up the formatting somehow), but I find it clunky, feature-bloated, kind of moon-logic-based sometimes and carelessly ported to the mac. Not unlike an open source Adobe Acrobat and just as annoying.
Even the “updated on a weekly basis” part feels adobe-like and to me at least, not a plus.
http://geeksarewired.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/funny-adobe-acrobat-reader-icon.jpg
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I just cant stand reading on a tablet/phone, my eyes start burning after a few minutes, and I can never dim the light low enough to read in bed.
In fact, for a long time my e-reader of choice was a handspring visor Palm device 
It was funky green with a 16 Mhz processor and really spotty backlighting that would make the letters glow green in the dark. When I finally upgraded to a fancier color tungsten, I stopped reading on it.
Edit: Here’s a picture of the palm reading in the dark experience 
http://stackingbooks.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/backlight.jpg
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I have the same one, too; they were popular enough that they still sell them as the Kindle Keyboard, four years later.
I scratch my head about people who use devices like the iPad to read books. I have a Kindle Fire and it’s become the kids’ device more than anything (of all the First World Problems, this is the First Worldiest).
For the people who want to get, say, public domain books but aren’t wanting to get them through Amazon, you can always snag them from Project Gutenberg and convert/sideload them using an app mentioned above called Calibre. As long as you have a PC or Mac, you can get those books on there. Come to that, when I wrote a short ePub ebook a while back, I used Calibre to sideload it before I put it on the store. Before I discovered apps like Flipboard (and when I was too busy with work to dink around on websites), I used Calibre to snag the RSS feeds of sites like, say, BoingBoing, and grab a digest of stories.
Many, many years ago, when I was still in school, I noticed that some scientific papers could not be reproduced on a black and white photocopier-- the meat of the papers involved electroluminescent gels that were reproduced in full color, and turned out as black smears when photocopied. So, for certain fields, a color display is required to read scientific papers.
The typesetting standard scientific journals also impose a requirement for a large high resolution screen, as many of them use letter size paper, and two columns. To read a table of data, one must refer to the text, which necessitates that both the table and text be visible and legible at the same time.
On a classic kindle, the resolution is not sufficient. On a touch screen device, the reader can pan between views, and zoom in quickly enough, so some, but not all of the screen resolution problem can be solved.
but, then, there is the eye strain problem. I suppose that a color e ink display could help, but a 10-12 inch color e-ink device doesn’t really exist, and I’m not sure that it will.
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Yeah but Amazon has a larger number of books for sale.
The Kobo also have the benefit of a microSD slot.
Second vote for Calibre! It’s awesome.
I have the second version which came out last September and it’s pretty good. Very solid e-reader.
OK. Everyone is right. Calibre is wonderful AND horrible. Wonderful because it is so powerful and most of all useful. Horrible because it feels like an Apache httpd.conf with a GUI slammed on top. BUT they do have the simple buttons along the top so they seem to understand the need for simplicity. Maybe one day someone will get it right.
Re the DX. I’m in the market for an e-reader for my dad. He’s rapidly going blind (he had to stop driving a year or two ago) and would benefit from an e-reader because you can so easily pump up the font size and there really aren’t that many large print books in the Library. For some unfathomable reason we can’t get a larger Paperwhite. Once you enlarge the text to a decent size on the Paperwhite there’s not that much left on the screen. Why have they discontinued this size? Are the larger e-ink screens that much more expensive?
One option would be to use an Android tablet and text to speech. Moon+ Reader Pro offers good TTS integration, has scalable text and works with the built in Android voices, and 3d party Android compatible TTS voices. Moon+ Reader Pro works with just about every ebook format, but it does not read DRMed files.
I don’t have Kindle Fire, so I don’t know if Amazon still offers TTS or if they have switched over to pushing their synced (at extra cost) text and Audible recorded books (when available).
