The Digital Readers :

Good old Printed books - who read them now a days? In the digital era, Ebooks are a new trend. They are the books of future. The Poortable Document Format(PDF) has revolutionized the Ebooks section. Though mostly these Ebooks are confined to PCs/desktops/laptops. But people do complain that they don't get the feel to read them. Yes, the flexiblity to lay down and read and touch and feel effect of the traditional books is missing in reading on Computers. So to add new advantage to these Ebooks, hand held mobile devices and portable digital ebooks readers entered markets (In India these are in complete Nascent stage) . The most famous are the Amazon's Kindle and the Sony Ebook Reader.

 

The Amazon's Kindle	The Sony Reader

 

The Kindle

The Cool Part of Kindle is that it uses the EVDO network (think cell phones) to connect and download books. Amazon foots the bill on that, so there’s no monthly access charges. When you finish a book and want to buy another, the Kindle is ready to accommodate wherever you are. No syncing or connecting to a PC or network or anything. Make your purchase and Amazon pushes the new book down to your Kindle. :tongue:

Click Here to know more about Amazon's New Kindle 2

Google joins Sony

Now comes the competition--Google and Sony announced that Google would make its free public-domain eBooks available on the Sony Reader. With Sony’s eLibrary now increased to more than 600,000 volumes, Amazon and its Kindle eBook reader are potentially faced with some serious competition, and the Kindle may become more open as a result.This marks the first time that Google has made its scanned books, which can be downloaded in PDF format, available specifically for an eReader in ePub format.Till now they could only be read on PCs.

In what is perhaps a bid to make its device more competitive, Sony also lowered the price of its PRS-700 reader by $50, to just under $350, bringing it to a price point slightly under that of the recently released Kindle 2, which retails for $359 on Amazon.com.

But the draw back is that to get books on to the Sony Reader, the user first downloads them from Sony’s website using a computer, then connects the Reader to the computer.

Any way there is another advantage with the digital readers. Think of how many trees could be saved if paper production and prinitng gives way to Ebooks