What's the point of tablets/e-readers, and why might I enjoy having one?

In My Humble Opinion
1

OK, so I’m getting curious about e-readers and tablets, due to a bunch of news I’ve been reading about them recently. Basically: what can they do, at the various price points, that I’d find useful?

I mean, I have a smartphone – finally bought one (a cheap and cheerful Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini) half a year ago. I’m finding it fantastically useful, and finally have reasons to always carry my phone. I also have a laptop and desktop PC, both of which are fine for work, studies, and gaming. I do use my phone quite a bit (at least a half hour daily, I guess) for news, through the BBC app and a “Global News” app to follow lots of newspapers through the browser and through RSS feeds. The tiny screen isn’t great for following the news, though, and it’s utterly impractical for e-books and other walls of text. It does fine with my email, which my phone checks automatically (all 4 accounts) every hour.

So, why might I want/enjoy an e-reader or tablet? Whenever I need to type or play games, my PCs are perfect, even preferable. My phone is fine for email and GPS. All the platforms have music. I do sometimes wish I could comfortably read news and the SDMB and watch video lying on the bed – not practical with my laptop. I love books, though I don’t get around to reading them much at the moment – but I might get some use out of e-books, especially free ones (e.g. classics from the Gutenberg project. Lots of great books there, but I hate reading books or stories from a computer monitor).

Also, I’m cheap. No way in hell am I paying for an iPad, nor will I pay a monthly fee for usage.

Finally, I live in Brazil at the moment, and my internet connection isn’t great, while few places have public wi-fi.

So, what might I get out of a basic tablet/e-reader? What capabilities do they have that I’d enjoy besides easier news/e-book/online short story reading? I guess I also have limited options here – to avoid paying extortionate shipping charges I’d probably have to buy from Brazil or Scandinavia. I’ve noticed deals on things like the “Eyo pad” (presumably junk, as a Chinese tablet knock-off), and the eastern European “PocketBook”. (Will the new Kindle thingy be available/work outside the US, BTW?)

Thanks in advance!

(Should mention that I might get a cheap one in any case. My wife has no smartphone or laptop, but has lots of downtime at work where she’d like to be able to study. She got good use out of a netbook, until that got nicked.)

2

E-readers are much, much better to read books on because the screen looks more like paper. There’s no eyestrain (no more than from reading a book). The books are somewhat cheaper than real books, out-of-copyright works are free or pennies, and you can carry hundreds around at a time - magazines too. You can also use them as a music player and, if it’s got 3G for very basic internet browsing even when there’s no wifi.

Some older people I know are getting them because you can increase the font size easily. They’re also handy for reading in bed without disturbing your partner, if you get a cover with a light.

I got mine mainly because I have a small flat and books take up too much space.

TBH I’ve never seen the point of tablets, and can’t afford one anyway, but I’m sure someone else will tell you their good points.

3

Most of the above only applies to e-readers like the Kindle with proper ‘e-ink,’ btw. I don’t see the point in one without that.

4

My wife loves her Kindle and uses it a** lot**.

I really, really want to convince myself that purchasing a tablet is a good idea but I just can’t justify it to myself, as my smartphone does all of the same stuff, albeit with a smaller screen.

5

Hold a thousand books. Increase font size. I think they can turn them into audio books, but I haven’t tried that. They can play chess and other games. I don’t know if they do email and stuff yet.

The advantage over a laptop is that they are much lighter and the battery lasts much longer. But they are very simple devices by comparison.

6

The Kindle Fire is going to fill in a lot of gaps for a lot of people. I like my NON e-ink reader because I don’t need a light to read at night, yay! I read a lot more at night than I do in bright sunlight; not that sunlight stops me, I just find some shade or make some by turning away from the sun, but it’s so rare it’s not even worth considering.

7

I love my ereader. Love it.

I have 40 books at my fignertips in an object lighter than a book and no bigger than a paperback, and when I want to buy more books I can do it for less than the store price. From my house or any place with Wi-Fi.

It’s great for restaurant reading if, like me, you travel on business a lot.

8

I have a Pocketbook 302. It was just about $100. I’d recommend a newer one though.

I’m thinking of getting another one, since it can’t go on the net and I’d like to be able to annotate PDFs better. But I have about 100 books (could do more) on it, I can look up words I don’t know instantly, it’s easy to read several books at once, I can take notes, etc, I can adjust the font size as much as I want.

I’ve read a lot of manga on it and would like to get a tablet so I can read color comics.

9

Silver Tyger mentioned looking up words. That’s one of the things I like about my Kindle. If I’m reading and come across a word I don’t know, I move the cursor next to it and a definition pops up. This has come in useful while reading some of the older classics since they tend to contain some out of date terms.

10

You mentioned Project Gutenberg books and how they are difficult to read on a computer monitor and that is a great use case for the Kindle. As mentioned it provides a reading experience like paper and is a lot easier on the eyes than a monitor. It’s also really light and has a very long battery life. Plus it’s really cheap now and you can probably order it in Brazil from Amazon.com though you may have to pay some import tax.

I personally haven’t found a good use for tablets though and don’t have one. It does seem to be an in-between device between a smartphone and a laptop and I don’t really need one. One problem with an iPad sized tablet is that it’s really not very comfortable to hold for long especially since you are usually holding with one hand and interacting with the other. I could see myself buying a 7 inch Android tablet some day especially since they are dropping quickly in price.

11

My daughter bought me a nook, and I thought that I wouldn’t like it. But I do. My nook goes everywhere with me, I only have to recharge it infrequently, and I already have 50 books on it. I’ve been able to find things like compilations of works by some old favorite authors of mine, for a ridiculously low price. I’ve also been able to find some books that have been re-released in ebooks, but which probably won’t be reprinted in dead tree versions.

And I was waiting for an appointment last week, and bought three books in the waiting room. Now, that could be a feature or a drawback, depending on how healthy your bank account is. But for a night owl like me, being able to browse a virtual bookstore and get my books delivered within a couple of minutes is absolute heaven.

12

I’m like Lynn Bodoni. My Sony was a gift, I would have never bought one for myself. I don’t even buy new books for myself. But…now, after a month of having it, if something happens to it, I will certainly replace it as soon as possible.

I can check ebooks out at the Library, and when they are due back, they just expire and I don’t get overdue fines which is a good thing.

There are lots of free ebooks available online. I get a lot of books from here http://www.baen.com/library/

Its also a great conversation starter. People will see me reading, ask about the reader, then ask what I’m reading, then tell me what they are reading. As a bibliophile, I approve of these conversations. (I do find it odd that I didn’t have as many when I was reading dead tree books, though.)

13

The main draw of e-readers and tablets is convenience. They’re more portable than the items they compete with.

14

While I love my Kindle I don’t see having much personal use for a tablet. It’s to big to carry around with me and at home I can just use a laptop or desktop. If I need quick information, like if there’s an ATM or a service station nearby, I can find it on my phone.

But they do have commercial uses. The company where I work has salespeople traveling all over the country and we’re starting to roll out iPads to them. They’d have to carry either a tablet or a laptop when they make a sales call and the tablet is smaller and is sufficient for what they need it for.

15

Thanks for all the replies!

OK, so from what I read here and from research elsewhere, it looks like what I’d prefer is an e-ink e-book reader; being able to watch films would be great, but probably not worth the cost and the sacrifice in battery duration of a tablet. Ideally what I’d like is the broadest possible selection of file formats, and a functional browser, email, and rss applications. I suppose that would also mean needing a touchscreen. What are my best options?

Some options that look cheap&cheerful are the Icarus Go and the PocketBook 602, but I guess they don’t have the above features. The PocketBook 603 looks interesting, but appears to be unavailable. Some of the cheap tablets still look tempting, I admit, like the PocketBook IQ and the Kindle Fire…

And I still can’t seem to get clear information about if/how well a Kindle and its connection to Amazon would work outside the US. I’ve tried to use the Amazon mobile site with my smartphone in Sweden and Brazil, and couldn’t get it to work – IIRC it wasn’t available in my location. Might just have been the material I was trying to access, although that’s still annoying restriction.

Ooh, another weird question - are there location requirements for using e-book libraries? Like, could I check out books from Swedish libraries while still living in Brazil?

Thanks again!

16

You might check out www.mobileread.com. They have a wiki dedicated to details on every reader. The forum is also good for getting opinions. The ereader matrix is a good place to start, although it doesn’t have info about wifi.

17

I have been scanning the roughly 5000 or so paperbacks we have and OCRing them into epub files. They are falling apart, so I figure since the scanning process kills them, I paid for 1 copy, I maintain 1 copy. Pretty much they are all out of print and will probably never be made available again, so I might as well =)

I do realize that because of my failing health, I will be in an assisted living facility at some point in time, so I need to reduce my belongings to a minimum, so I am figuring the optimum will end up being laptop, ebook reader of whatever format, and an ipod or equivalent, unless they come up with a tablet that will play the MMORPG of choice as well as act as my ereader and music player. [which they very well may in the 20 or so years between now and the need to move into a facility.]

I do forsee in the future that internet access will become effectively a right not an option, even in assisted living as more and more life takes place online. I also see a tablet with bluetooth as the catch all telephone, internet access, email access and entertainment platform. As it is, I do 90% of my reading for entertainment on my droid. I have a few magazines I get in hard copy that I have not yet changed to e-subscription.

18

You borrow ebooks from regular public libraries that choose to have ebook lending, so the location requirement is the same as whatever it is to get a library card there. (Actually, I’m in the U.S. and I guess it’s possible that there would be a different situation in some countries, but not that I’ve heard of.)

19

The main advantage to me is that I take a lot of subways and trains, and an ereader is a lot lighter and smaller than most books - or at least, than most of the books sold in Spain, where the market for physical books has increasingly gone large-print and hardcover. Another advantage is that getting a book downloaded from abroad is faster than waiting for the mail/messenger to bring it.

In the next couple of years I may also be back to taking a lot of planes, sometimes for 12-14h flights. At the speed I read and if I didn’t fall asleep, that would be 2-2.5 novels per leg… would it look terribly nerdy if I hug my ereader?

Middlebro went for a tablet instead, because he was more interested in video for his kids.

20

Oh, and since the OP was asking about accesing Amazon from outside the US: my ereader is a Kindle. I had to get it from the US and have to download books from Amazon US, even now that they have a store in Spain (compulsory remark: SGAE are a bunch of assholes).