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Comment by ktharavaad | Hacker News Reader

I'll share my experience with ebook readers here. As someone who owns over 30 gigs of ebooks and reads academic journals often, I was naturally excited when the whole slew of ebook reading device hit the market.

I've tried 3 different E-book readers: The sony PRS505, the Kindle and the iRex iLiad. In the end, I returned the kindle and gave the 505 to my dad and kept the iRex. The main reason was that the Kindle screen was WAYYY TOO SMALLL to read full sized Pdfs and academic journals.

The sony had the same screen-size problem as the Kindle but its cheaper and it was a good fit for my dad, who mainly reads fiction books. The iRex was the keeper because of its big 8 inch screen.

The new kindle 2 seems to have the same screen size as the previous one, so this is an absolute no-buy for me. However, the upcoming plastic logic reader looks promising with its full A4 sized screen and could be a good fit for me.

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At $699, the iRex also costs nearly twice as much as a Kindle and about three times what you can get a PRS505 for. I have no doubt the 8 inch screen is great, but that's a pretty big jump in price-- especially when you consider that the Kindle is already priced too high for many consumers.

Yes, the iRex is prohibitively expensive but if you buy the 1st edition while its on sale, you can get it for around $100 cheaper than that.

In the end, I justified the purchase because of the features I'm getting over the other 2 readers. - The sony and kindle both have a 800x600 screen while the iRex has a 1024x768. - The iRex also has a wacom stylus embedded into the screen which you can take notes with - The iRex is open-sourced, the developer released the SDK a while ago and there is a bunch of 3rd party free software for it.

However, I can definitely see how the iRex can be overpriced for some people and the sony and kindle could be a better fit for them.

A good resource for ebook reader information is http://www.mobileread.com/ (i'm not affiliated with them in any way) . You can read other people's experiences with them and find out which reader is right for you.

I have only used one ebook reader, but have been very pleased with it so far. I purchased the eBookwise 1150 a few years ago for $99 (now $136). I am sure there are bigger, better, faster readers out there, but this may be appropriate for a casual reader like myself.

The eBookwise Librarian software package ($15) converts .DOC, .RTF, .HTML and RB files to the eBookwise Librarian format.

eBookwise Reader: http://www.ebookwise.com/ Librarian Software: http://www.ebookwise.com/servlet/mw?t=book&bi=28181&...

I re-read Dune on my Sony reader and it was what I wanted. I agree, though, the problem is with any kind of books that have diagrams, code listings, two column formats don't render nicely on it.

What I worry about the iRex is that things will be scaled down by a third which I won't like, either.

The Plastic Logic reader isn't coming out until 2010, btw. :( I think someone else will come along in that time.

Why not just buy a netbook if you're going to carry something around that large? I'm not trolling here--it's a sincere question. I do like the idea of "e-ink" though, and I haven't seen a device that uses it, so my opinion might be changed in favor of ebook readers if the e-ink technology is really that much superior.

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