Sony Clie (as Reader)
I've tried using a few different dedicated ebook readers. They suck; they are much worse than paper books. But I do like using my Palm handheld as an ebook reader, especially at night in bed with the backlight on. I bought a Sony Clie T615C with a color 320 x 320 screen for about $75 used. I see they're going for less than $50 on eBay now. A great deal for a 16MB device.
The screen is about 2.5 x 2.5 inches and it's at least as legible as a computer screen, if not more. The pixels are very small and the characters are very sharp. This high resolution is key for reading -- the kind of screen that comes with the Treo 600, for example, is no good for long texts. Any Palm device will work, but standard low resolution (160x160) makes it more difficult to read. The Sonys and the Palm Tungsten have that satisfying high resolution (320x320).
The free Palm Reader allows bookmarking, searching, and note-taking. It's a great little app. Invisible until you need it. To turn the page, you just tap the screen (there are several other ways to turn the page).
The best place to buy ebooks for handhelds is from Palm Digital Media, which sells ebooks for Palm and Windows handhelds. Palm Digital has lots of the books I want, like Steven Johnson's Mind wide Open, and Bill Bryson's A Brief History of Nearly Everything. The prices are good, too. Mind Wide Open costs $13.49 here. It's $17.50 on Amazon in paper. Best of all, there's no waiting for the book to show up in the mail -- you get it the instant you pay for it. I've read a couple of dozen books this way, and have come to resent having to use real books, which now seem too heavy to have to hold up.
-- Mark Frauenfelder
Sony Clie T6152
$160 new
Amazon
Favorite (15)
Anthony
I use a Clie SJ-22 right now to read ebooks that are widely available and free. It is good at night for reading and writing too.
Ponderz
The sony clies make a really good ebook reader. All the models have memory card to store up to a hundred plus book. You can even carry multiple cards for more books. The OS4 models can only go up to 128MB max and the OS5 support more than that.
My favorite is the SJ20. It's black and white saves battery, high resolution and back light makes for any time reading great. I have had one for 4 years now and still working. I got it used and changed battery once. There are a lot of font that support other languages. Need help with putting Vietnamese books on it? email me at ponderz@hotmail.com
monina bautista
Thanks for your informative comments. I really enjoy reading books, especially the twilight series, the paperbacks are big and heavy and bulky. My son, a college student took pity on me and downloaded the book series in pdf file format from the internet. I enjoyed reading it so much that I have already read them 10 times! Imagine that! But I use them on my laptop. Where can I find a used Clie SJ-20 in the Philippines. I can't afford to buy a brand new one. Please help me. Thank you so much.
Hank Roberts
The Clies haven't been made for years now.
But the TH55 is still the best ebook reader out there.
Visible in sunlight
Visible in complete darkness (there's a 3rd party app to dim the screen further than the lowest standard brightness; there's another called Fonts4OS5 for importing fonts; and much else)
Mobipocket Reader among many others lets you change fonts and colors.
On the Mac side for cleaning up text to make it readable, there's
TextSoap (which does most of what you need), and
PorDiBle (which does the last step, text file to PDA file format)
On the Net there's Project Gutenberg and many other free sources.