Another eBook reader- BeBook: phones work better
The race to produce the favorite dedicated eBook reader is going strong with word of the release of the BeBook Reader. This reader has the standard fare with some corner cutting to keep the price down. It is going up against a gaggle of readers, not the least of which are the two major ones, the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle.
We have long been ebook lovers and have tried nearly every dedicated reader to come along but don’t use any of them in the real world. We still find our phone to be the perfect eBook reading platform simply because it’s already with us everywhere we go. We have long used Windows Mobile phones, Blackberries and currently the iPhone to consume massive amounts of the written word.
BusinessWeek is becoming aware of this phenomenon given a recent article they published on the same subject. The author points out the same thing we’ve been saying for years:
Adam Parks is an avid reader of digital books. But you won’t find him downloading the 20 or so titles he reads each year onto an electronic book device like Amazon’s Kindle. Instead, Parks flips through pages—Web-site design manuals and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War are recent favorites—on his trusted iPhone.
Parks is one of a growing number of people getting their book fix via mobile phone, a method he considers more convenient than using a dedicated e-book reader like the Kindle or Sony’s Reader Digital Book. “I travel a lot in Asia and in the U.S.,” says Parks, a marketing executive who resides in Palm Beach, Fla. “If you are running from airport to airport and from city to city, bringing an extra piece of equipment loses some of its value.”
We couldn’t agree more and every new dedicated reader we try gets put up on the shelf in short order. Devices like the Kindle or Sony Reader provide a better reading experience with the bigger screen no doubt, but the phone is always in the pocket when reading time presents itself. Plus you don’t have a major disappointment when you travel and discover you left the Kindle at home. The phone is always available to sit down and relax with a good book.
Say what you want about the Kindle itself but Amazon’s ebook selection makes that platform for me. I’ve also found them to be surprisingly responsive to the “I’d like to read this book on my Kindle” submissions (a very handy link they put up for books not presently available as Kindle editions)
I haven’t found many of the scientific tomes I get to read available for the eReader-iPhone platform. But you can hit up Amazon on your Kindle and be plowing through “Fractal Concepts in Condensed Matter Physics” in a couple minutes (even Whispernet struggles on that worthy tome).
But when it comes to Zinio my fave is still my LE1700… I’ve never seen anyone actually comfortably read a magazine like Foreign Policy or MIT Review on an iPhone.
Of course I wouldn’t be amazed if pressure from devices such as iphone’s result in changes in such publications to make them more readable on such tiny mobile devices.
Sorry, but I disagree with you guys. Your argument sounds a bit like saying “A new laptop released: phones work better”.
My wife and I both have Sony Readers. I also have an iPhone. I use the iPhone a lot for casual reading of RSS feeds and sometimes newspaper articles, but I never use it to read books. Why? Because I don’t read books in 5 minute chunks, just like I don’t watch movies in chunks on my iPhone as I wait at the grocery store checkout line or at Starbucks. I don’t carry my Sony Reader with me all the time, so I don’t have access to my book at any given moment, but that’s fine — I choose to fill those random moments with other useful tasks such as reading email or feeds.
Another argument is battery life. I read ebooks a lot when traveling. The Sony reader lasts a long time (multiple books) without requiring recharging. Can you run your iPhone on a transcon 5 or 6 hr flight and still make phone calls at the other end?
I know people who cannot be found *anywhere* without a paperback in their hands. They read a few pages on the way from their desk to the cafeteria at work. Fine if that’s how they enjoy reading books. But it’s not me.
Oh yeah, and the argument that you won’t be disappointed if you discover while traveling that you left the Kindle at home? Are you serious? If you’re that forgetful, maybe maintain a “packing list” on your iPhone — there are plenty of “to do” style apps out there.
OK, I never thought I’d say this, but after being snowed in for eleven days with no way for UPS to deliver my new books from Amazon for a long awaited holiday break readathon, I finally broke down and installed both eReader and Stanza on my iPod touch. After reading the first book on my touch, I went ahead and purchased seven more. My vision isn’t all that great so I was more than pleasantly surprised by the quality of the text on the screen. No fuzziness here even with a touchscreen! Man, I can even read on my touch in the dark! It is so great!
…now if only Apple had a slighly bigger touch, say maybe with a five or six-inch screen, that would make it a perfect digital reader as well as a much better video viewer!
All the arguments I’ve read here make sense to me and reading them in rapid succession left me with the impression that we are all making some compromise when it comes to a digital book reading platform. To me that’s a clear indication that the technology has yet to be packaged in a way that meets enough people’s reading needs/wants.
BeBook is a great reader, mostly because it supports so many formats which you can easly get **ahem** free on the internet
If buying it from official website (http://mybebook.com) you can get a discount of 25€ if typing in this coupon code:
markos.place@gmail.com
Also valid for AUSD, sadly not valid for USD buyers, because od the USD value drop.
Works great for me. I loaded it up with pdfs and .doc files from work in addition to a few dozen free ebooks.
I’m glad I bought it, but I still want a Kindle too.