ereaders – OZTHOUGHTS

What You Need To Consider When Buying An Ereader

Ereader or Tablet? Which should you buy? A bit of help for you here…

It can be very confusing when you think you might like to leap into the world of ereading and ebooks. There are so many different models out there, and the considerable problem of the various ebook formats as well.

ereaders

To help you a bit in making a choice I shall discuss some of the main considerations you should take into account before parting with your hard earned money and committing yourself to one or other model of ereader.

Does colour matter to you?

The first thing to consider is do you want to read novels rather than ebooks with loads of illustrations or magazines or comics? If the answer to that question is comics, magazines and other reading matter with lots of colour and illustrations, then you need to consider a tablet rather than a dedicated ereader, as most real ereaders are monochrome, and not really very good to view images with.

There are a number of ereaders with LCD screens which can manage colour OK, but their screens tend to be too small to be really pleasurable to view images with. But with things such as the iPad and similar tablets, comics, magazines newspapers and coffee table ebooks and similar are a real pleasure to read and gaze upon, given the brilliant colours they can offer you.

If on the other hand you want to read ebooks that are basically text – novels and similar, then probably a real, dedicated monochrome ereader is what you want, as they are specifically designed for this form of reading, and are totally optimised for such ebooks.

So that is your first decision. Colour and images = tablet. Text and almost no images = dedicated monochrome ereader.

Screen size.

This is perhaps the next consideration. If you are suffering from any sort of eye troubles, then the larger the screen you can get is something you should think about. Since if you have a smallish screen, and need the text size to be large, obviously you can then only fit so many words onto the screen at a time, so with a small screen you will be turning pages like a mad thing, but with a larger screen you will be able to have the letters quite large, but still have a reasonable number of words per page.

Currently the only large screen dedicated ereader I am aware of is the Kindle DX, which has a screen that is 9.7 inches diagonally across, room enough to make the letters huge and still have lots of words on the screen, otherwise you should consider a tablet again.

Most dedicated ereaders these days have a screen that is about 6 or 7 inches diagonally, which if your eyes are OK, is much like reading an average paper back.

So, if your eyes are OK, then any dedicated ereader will work for you , if not, consider a tablet with a much larger screen whatever sort of ebooks you want to read on it.

Front light or clip on reading light.

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Macular Degeneration and Ereaders

For those elderly folk who suffer from one form of macular degeneration or another, it seems that ereaders offer an ideal solution to their problems with reading.

Macular degeneration is defined as follows:-

Macular degeneration is a silent and painless loss of central vision due to the degeneration or dying of cells in the retina, called the macula.

What is lost is the central portion of your sight – what you see right in front of you like the face of a person or the words in a book.

Obviously this will give tremendous problems when trying to read, as we use the centre of our field of vision to see the letters on the page – try to read a book only looking at the page from the edge of your field of vision – sort of looking off to the left or right and see how easy it is to read the page whilst not actually looking at it properly and you will see what I mean.

In fact there are a whole load of different versions of this particular eye problem, but they all entail the loss of centre field vision to one degree or another, and all, obviously effect how easy and pleasurable it is to read a book.

And this is where ereaders come into their own as opposed to regular printed paper books, which unless you buy yourself large print versions of whatever book you wish to read, the letters (fonts) are way too small for someone with this particular eye problem to see to any degree.

Added to which is the sad fact that not all books are published in a large font version, and generally they also cost more than their standard versions as well. So paper books are really not much use to those suffering from this particular form of eye problem – which is a quite large proportion of people over 65 years of age, sadly. Continue reading “Macular Degeneration and Ereaders”

Turn Your Google Docs Into Epub Files

Here is another great bit of news for people who write ebooks, or actually, any sort of book that they might wish to publish for ereaders.

Google have just quietly added a truly useful new trick to their Google Docs app. You can now save your Google Doc as an ePub file, which is the file format used by all ereaders except the Kindle, Well at least for now, it is on the desk top versions of Google Docs, such as you have on a Chrome Book for example, or if you use Chrome as your web browser. I gather that shortly it will be available for all Android users.

It is amazingly simple to use, simply have your document open, click on File menu > Download as > EPUB Publication (.epub), and the job is done.

Having done this, you will be able to put your document (Major Literary Work) directly onto pretty well any ereader – except of course the dreaded Amazon Kindle,, which typically of large companies, uses its own ebook format in an attempt to force Kindle owners to buy all their ebooks from Amazon.

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