I’m looking at getting a couple of e-readers. We’ll probably be getting Wi-Fi only ones, since we live in Guam (there isn’t a real bookstore on the island anywhere) and I don’t think we can access the 3G service from here and therefore don’t think it’s worth spending the additional money for the 3G service.
But I’m a little unsure of which way to go. We’ve narrowed it down to the Amazon and Barnes and Noble offerings. The reviews I’ve read online seem to make it something of a toss-up (I do like the idea of the SD card for the Nook though). We’ve played with the Nook a bit (while we were still in the US) but we don’t know anyone with a Kindle we can try out.
So dopers, what thoughts and advice do you have for us?
I’ve used both and it really is pretty much a toss-up. Unless you’re a super-avid reader who reads constantly, the differences are negligible. For example, the small color screen on the Nook is nice, but it shortens battery life. The thing is, battery life is still measured in days, so you can get 5-10 days of reading time on the Nook vs 7-14 on the Kindle. Like I said, it really depends on how much time you spend reading every day.
The one distinguishing feature that would cause me to choose a Nook over a Kindle is that the Nook supports the ePub format, while the Kindle uses a proprietary format. So on a Nook you can read any book dowloaded from any site as long as it’s in the ePub format, but on a Kindle you can only read books downloaded from Amazon in their proprietary format. The flip-side of that is that the Nook doesn’t support viewing Word documents, and the Kindle does.
No preference here (I use ebooks on the iPod, formerly on a Palm Pilot) but I happened to notice that Amazon just announced the newest generation of the Kindle including one that was 50 dollars cheaper but wi-fi only.