Vexed What-eReader-should-I-buy question

Some time around the turn of the century I got a PDA, one of the first Compaq iPAQs. It was a chunky beast, but pretty versatile, and a new dawn of mobile PDA-ing, gaming, music and other converged joys awaited. I quickly discovered 2 truths, one was that most of the games available fell into the diverting category, i.e. fine for a few minutes, but not compelling. The second was that even if there was a Pokemon/Final Fantasy Tactics game of great depth it would fall behind compared to a good book. Curiously, almost 10 years later, and now wielding a mobile device of unimaginable power and sophistication compared to the iPaq, I find these truths largely hold true still. The games on the iPad do transcend “diverting”, for sure, but they still can’t compete with eBooks!

I am now frequently asked to recommend eReader/eBooks and this is actually a very difficult question to answer. It really requires one of the flowcharts that XKCD do such a good job of. Alas, I am not in their league. Still there are a couple of key questions to ask that can get you a long way towards making a decision (or a long way further off as well).

A caveat. I am assuming that you want to buy ebooks – if you want to steal them then none of this matters, since you can steal them to suit your device of choice. Sadly, life is easier for the thieves, curse them. 90% of the complexity and length of this post is because of DRM making it awkward for paying customers. I dearly wish this wasn’t the case.

First question is, do you care about being able to re-read books in the future, or transfer them to different devices? This informs the second question, which is the choice of eReader device i.e.

• Dedicated eReader (Kindle, Kobo, Sony etc.)


• Smartphone (iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile)


• Tablet (err, IPad really)

Armed with the answers to those questions we can make some progress.If you really don’t care about future re-reads, or transferability of books, then I can point you to Kindle, regardless of choice of device, since the Kindle reader is everywhere! I can’t recommend anything else, alas, as the DRM infrastructure for ePub is tricky and far from transparent.

At this point I will assume that you have some interest in the longevity of your ebooks, and want to exercise some control over them. Apart from a few noble exceptions most books are sold with Digital Rights Management (DRM) that prevents any such thing. In order to take control of your purchases you have to strip that off, a task that isn’t terribly tricky, but is probably illegal.

A brief word of history here, the first book format I purchased was Microsoft Reader, which had DRM baked into the reader software and was based on device activation – by far the most unreliable and plain stupid form of DRM. After a couple of device changes I was locked out of my books and had to beg Microsoft to gain access to them. That (and several company bankruptcies) convinced me that I would only buy ebooks when I knew that I could disable the DRM. Publishers take note: my 3 huge spending sprees on eBooks coincided with discovering how to remove DRM from PDB (Palm eReader), ePUB (Adobe Adept) and Kindle ebooks. At present tools to remove DRM from iBooks don’t exist (probably because sales are too low for anyone to care) so I haven’t bought anything from the iBookStore.

Anyway, tools do exist to remove DRM, so that you can “steal” the books that you have bought. They tend to move about as people get cold feet about hosting them, but they have got simpler to use, especially on the Mac where some kind individual wrapped them up in a nice AppleScript bundle. It still isn’t straightforward enough to recommend to non-technical types though. Once you have removed the DRM then your book is just a file and you can read it on any device that supports that format, or convert it with something like Calibre.

You are now ready to choose a device, if you have persisted this long. Most people will have given up and taken the path of least resistance and gone for being locked into a single vendor. This will work for the short term, but at the expense of probable future pain.

Device selection is actually simpler.

Smartphones have a small selection of eBook readers that handle most formats, even if you are stuck with DRM eBooks. The small screen size is not ideal of course, but you do have the virtue of having the device with you all the time. The Kindle and iBooks apps also sync your location in your books so that you can read on phone and switch to a device with a bigger screen when it suits. If you have a smart phone, Kindle, iBooks, Bluefire Reader, Aldiko and Kobo are good places to start.

The choice between dedicated readers like Kindle, Sony etc. or a general tablet device like iPad is one of portability against flexibility. I am going to ignore the squalid squabbles about eInk vs. LCD displays that get people all excited. Just note that if you get eInk device you will need a light to read in the dark, but your experience in full sunlight is better. If either of those reading scenarios (bed or desert sands) is your main location then choose accordingly. Otherwise a tablet like iPad offers extreme flexibility in choice of reading software, even more so if you have stripped the DRM (and of course has a wide range of other software to do other exciting stuff). It is much bigger than Kindle/Sony etc for every day use as a reader though, which is where those devices edge ahead. The disadvantage to a dedicated device is that it will typically only read its own format of books, whether bought from their own store or sideloaded by yourself.

Executive Summary

If you are not too fussed at the moment about ebook longevity or portability, get a Kindle, or get the Kindle app on your smartphone or tablet.

If you do wish to future proof your purchases you need to strip the DRM off, or just buy from DRM-free vendors. In either case a smartphone or tablet will give you the most flexibility in reading your books (especially as you probably own one of these already).

So – a long rambling post that probably confuses rather than informs.

A short list of people supplying DRM free eBooks

Angry Robot Books
Baen
Book View Café

There are several others, but I am losing the will to live with this iPad Blog posting s/w, so will amend later...

Comments

[Iain Cheyne]

I suspect I will go for a second generation 7" Android tablet.

[Christo]

A good choice - a general purpose device with Aldiko or Bluefire ticks most boxes!