I read in bed after the wife has turned out the light to sleep. But I keep going through all those little book lights trying to find one that:
Is bright enough to actually read by comfortably. The LED ones aren’t bright or white enough. The ones with flashlight-type light bulbs are adequate, but no more than adequate.
Doesn’t throw off huge amounts of glare towards my wife’s face or light the room up with spread, that is, should be fairly directional. A halogen desk lamp is too bright.
The best one I’ve found is the Itty Bitty Book Light, but it’s not very directional, and I have to position myself, the light, and the book to avoid light streaming to the other side of the bed.
I only used one a few times, and it’s been a while, but there is a lot of variation in color and brightness between LEDs. Some are pretty blue, some range into the green range.
I’d buy them at places with a good return policy and see if you can find a good one. I will say that the LED models will have a significantly longer battery life than one using an incandescent bulb.
Are there any that use a “cold cathode” fluorescent tube? The light source would be spread out somewhat and may illuminate the page more evenly.
After decades of searching, I gave up. I currently use a Nokia 770 internet tablet as an ebook reader, it is backlit, rechargable, I can download to it easily, it powers off after a bit of inactivity and has a 2 gig capacity.
I’ve read over 50 books on it and now am completely spoiled. I can fall asleep and not lose my place or kill the battery, it is dim enough to not bother my husband and is the coolest thing since sliced bread.
The nokia 800 series is a newer version, I prefer my 770. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles, but as an ebook reader, it is perfect. It is linux based (maemo) and I use Fbreader software to read the books. It has wireless connectivity, so I just upload the books to my website and download them onto it, or I put them on the memory card.
I plan on buying several more, since I don’t see anything on the horizon that comes close to being so exactly what I want in an ebook reader.
Consider me one of the many readers flummoxed by the Kindle, no backlight? Are you insane? Who doesn’t read in bed?
I use a Palm LifeDrive as an ebook reader. I currently have ~600 books on it with a couple of thousand waiting to be converted to the ereader pdb format. It, of course, is backlit, plus it does many other things, too. You can’t buy them anymore, unfortunately. All you can buy are the smaller screened models. The ereader program will work on windows based pda’s.
I’ve looked a couple of days ago at a Sony reader. The new model comes with a backlight. I think it was $300. It reads pdf, txt, and its proprietary format (whatever that is).
