Just in case anyone is thinking of buying an ebook reader, I've just reviewed one of the cheapest out there. Very good buy and half the price of the Sony Touch.

Elonex 511eb Review

Colin M

That's a great review. I'm looking at ebook readers now but the price puts me off. The Elonex isn't exactly cheap but it looks like the best value there is!

There's something really comfortable about having the page nice and flat and facing you every time. It won't replace books, and I don't think it's meant to, but it's nice to have. Currently reading... best not say because it's not an official ebook! Amazing what you can find on this internet thing. But it's a big fat thing I always mean to buy when I was in my horror years.

There's an awful lot of officially free stuff out there too. Plus a friend has just got an ebook published (well, it comes out at the end of the month) and it would be nice to be able to read it in comfort. A 19" widescreen laptop isn't ideal for reading in bed!

A 19" widescreen laptop isn't ideal for reading in bed!

You can get software for your netbook (if it doesn't have it already) which re-orients the screen to portrait, so you can read it like a book.

Emma

<Added>

I stumbled across a pirate e-book of one of my novels, though. Didn't make me feel better disposed to the system, needless to say.

Thanks, Emma! That's useful to know but this machine is just too heavy! Nice idea though.

I stumbled across a pirate e-book of one of my novels.

The other way of looking at it, is "my books are so good, people are willing to face prison to get them"


Colin

Have you seen Cory Doctorow on piracy? He says the enemy of book sales isn't piracy it's obscurity.

I wonder if that will still hold up when ebooks become more prevalent.

Funnily enough, I was going to mention him in that post. He's got some great ideas, but he's a bit of an e-hippy - open source code and all that. I'm with him on DRM though. If I buy an ebook, I want to own it - not just own a licence. And that means if I want to pass it onto a friend to read, then that's fine too - just as I do with the DVDs and hardcopy books I buy.

I can understand publishers hating this, but as writers we have the advantage of weighing readership up against sales. Would you rather have 4000 sales and 4000 readers, or 2000 sales and 20,000 readers

Interesting review, Colin. That's just the sort of thing I can start dropping xmas hints about

What are the 100 pre-loaded books like? Presumably there's no choice?

Dee

Lots of classics, Dickens, Shakespear, Austen. Frankenstein and Dracula are in there, Huckleberry Finn, Sherlock Holmes. Enough to get you started. Saying that, I got a better version of Sherlock Holmes free from Adobe Digital Editions.

I've always had a soft spot for hippies. Not that I really understood what they were about at the time! (I was 16 at the end of the sixties.) Making his books freely available online seems to work for Doctorow but maybe it wouldn't if he was less well known or if ebook readers were more common. I like the idea though.

Cheers Colin.

Can I just ask what the QWERTY keyboard is used for? I can't see it mentioned anywhere.

You can search for keywords (except pdf files). Could be useful if you've got old books on there and need to reference. You need to use the software update, but as I put in the review, you need that anyway. You can also use the numbers to password protect the reader.