Choosing an eBook reader

I spent the past week trying to trying to decide which eBook reader to buy, both for myself as well as for my siblings. C. and I have had a Kindle 3 (now called Kindle Keyboard) for over a year now, and it's been very nice, but the keyboard interface is driving me crazy. So, I have been looking at Sony PRS-T1 and Nook Simple Touch, and -- to some degree -- the Kindle Touch. As always, all three have good and bad points, so the trick is deciding which has the most good points. Since this turned out to be a really long and involved process, I placed it behind the cut below, for those interested.

Sony PRS-T1

This is the eReader I like the most. It's the lightest of them all, has the smallest form factor, and the most features. The feature that "makes it" for me is the ability to use the (included) stylus to draw notes on the screen. You can either draw right on the page or select a passage and add a note linked to it. PRS-T1's capabilities with PDF files is another big feature for me. Despite the 6" screen, PRS-T1 does an amazing job of making PDFs easy to read. It's possible to increase the font size (which reformats the text), zoom in and out, crop the margins, switch to landscape orientation, and so on. Additionally, all the features that are available for EPUBs also work on PDFs, such as looking up words in a dictionary, highlighting, drawing, and adding notes.

Besides the above, I have also liked the following features:

• The PRS-T1 has good book management capabilities right on the device. In addition to getting books from the Sony Reader Store, there are also buttons for Google Books as well as Public Library. Plus, because it has a web browser, you can download books right from websites like Feedbooks. If you don't want a book any more, there is a way to delete it from the device.
• It was a very pleasant surprise to see that PRS-T1 doesn't just come, like other readers, with one dictionary, but with twelve of them. Yes, that's right, twelve: Oxford Dictionary of English, Oxford New American Dictionary, Oxford English-French/French-English, Collins German-EN/EN-German, Oxford Spanish-EN/EN-Spanish, Collins Italian-EN/EN-Italian, and Van Dale Dutch-EN/EN-Dutch. As an avid lover of dictionaries, I was quite ecstatic when I saw this.

While I love the above features, the Sony has a rather clunky interface that in some cases detracts from its good points. Not even going into the question of aesthetics or consistency, some of the interface decisions are just plain baffling:

• The most horrible is the search feature, which, instead of listing the matches on a page and letting you select the match you want, simply jumps from match to match as you would expect from a Find feature in your browser. While it may work for a webpage, I find it wholly inadequate on an eBook reader. Sometimes I want to see how the results are distributed in the book, how many matches were there, and so on, all of which is unavailable on the Sony device. It's not that difficult to add a list of matches, Sony, and then let the user jump from one to another if they want. Moreover, there is no simple way to go back to the page I started from once the search feature is invoked! Pressing the Back button just quits the search interface, leaving you on the page with the match you viewed last. To go back to where you were, you must press Menu then Navigate Page then Previous View and then click the buttons to return to where you where.
• The notes display is also frustrating, although not uniquely so among the eBook readers. I take a lot of notes when reading, so a list of all my notes sorted by the page number is not that helpful, especially when the handwritten notes -- the reader's main competitive feature -- are shown as excerpts from the beginning of the page the note appears on. Now, here is where jumping from note to note would be very helpful (along with a list). Instead, I have to resort to brute-force page flipping, since it takes way too long to go from the list of notes to a specific note and back to try the next note.
• Unlike other readers of the same generation, PRS-T1 does not support partial refreshes; every page-flip is accompanied by the full black-flashing refresh.

Despite the disappointing interface, this is the reader that I will most likely keep, and I just hope that Sony improves the interface in the subsequent firmware updates.

Nook Simple Touch

Another close contender for my next eBook reader, this one is attractive mainly because, well, it's attractive. The form factor and the interface are just beautiful. The rubbery finish not only does not leave fingerprints -- like the polished plastic of Sony PRS-T1 -- but also feels gorgeous; the wider margins help to hold the book easily without risking touching the screen. The user interface seems to be thoughtfully designed with a touch screen and modern aesthetics in mind, and combined with the physical design makes me feel like I'm holding a device that would not look out of place in the hands of Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: Next Generation or on the desk of Chancellor of the Republic in the Star Wars.

Some of the features that I really liked about the Nook are the Shelves, Find interface, and the note interface, along with a few other lesser ones:

• Unlike the PRS-T1's clunky Collections, which just presents a list of collections that requires clicking to see the books inside, Nook adopts the concept of Shelves, showing the books arranged on each Shelf right in the Library. If not all the books fit on the screen, there are buttons to "see all."
• Whereas the Sony reader just flips between its search matches in the book, Nook's Find feature shows a list of all matches with their respective page numbers and an excerpt centered on the bolded search term. Once you click on a match, it shows the page that it was found on, with a bar at the bottom allowing you to flip through the other matches with arrows. Overall, extremely convenient (Sony, please take note!)
• The note interface is likewise very good. On PRS-T1, I have to hold my finger on the passage with a note until a menu comes up with a button for View Note, which I have to click before a note is displayed. On the Nook, there is a little icon on the side of the screen next to the note, just large enough to press with a finger, which immediately shows the note without any other clicks.
• It's possible to select line spacing and margins, both of which make some books much easier to read. I like to set the spacing to "medium" (line height about 150% of the text height), which I think this is the main reason the text looks better to me on Nook than on PRS-T1.
• Nook does partial refreshes, with a full refresh happening only every sixth page turn. I have not notice any ghosting as a result of this.
• For those who are into things like this, Nook can be quite easily rooted (i.e. jailbroken) to run the full Android OS in parallel to the stripped down one used by default. That could allow people to even read Kindle books with the Kindle for Android app, check email, and so on. The excessive flashing and thus drain on the battery life make me rather sceptical about doing this long-term, though.

Just like the other eBook readers, however, this one has its problematic areas as well:

• Not only does Nook come with only one dictionary, the Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, the dictionary look-up interface is rather annoying. Unlike both Kindle and PRS-T1, both of which display the short definition at the bottom of the screen as soon as a word is selected, the Nook user must click Look Up after selecting a word, which then opens the full definition over the page.
• The PDF capabilities of Nook are laughable compared with PRS-T1, and don't even allow the user the look up words, highlight text, or add notes while reading PDFs. There is also no landscape mode, nor a way to zoom in; it does reflow the text when the font size is changed, but it does so haphazardly.
• Nook sometimes (depending on the book defaults?) tries to hyphenate words on the page, but seems to lack sophisticated algorithms to balance that with word padding, so the page ends up having way too many hyphenated words at the margins. Also, in one instance that I've seen, it simply ate the ending portion of the word it hyphenated.
• Almost half of the Home screen is taken up by the annoying WHAT TO READ _next_ section that shows some books from the "B&N Top 100" list. If I were looking for books to buy, I would go to the store, wouldn't I? I don't appreciate the store being shoved into my face like that.
• Like the PRS-T1, the Nook has physical buttons for page turning, in this case on both sides of the screen. However, they are difficult to press even when holding the eReader, and next to impossible when it lays on the table, as the rounded back causes the device to wobble at the pressure from the finger.

Overall, both my partner and I wanted to like Nook Simple Touch because it's just so pretty. Alas, the looks do not make up for the lack of features as compared to its competitors.

Kindle Touch

I did not feel the need to play with Kindle Touch, since from my research I learned that the interface has remained virtually unchanged from Kindle 3, and so I knew it would not have the features that make Sony PRS-T1 so appealing to me. Additionally, while Best Buy had the Kindles on display along with the Nooks and the Sony reader, the Kindle display models were in "demo mode" and did not actually allow the potential buyers to play with the interface. I was too disgusted with such practice to even bother doing anything with it. The lack of physical page turning buttons was another disappointment for me; I don't want to rely on the touch screen for that.

That said, after checking out both Nook Simple Touch and Sony PRS-T1, C. decided to stick with her Kindle Keyboard. It was comfortable to hold, the page turn buttons were convenient and easy to press, and the font used on the Kindles is gorgeous, and easily outstrips the other readers -- including Nook Simple Touch that comes with the same font -- in terms of readability. The well thought-out interface, even if it's not as flashy as the Nook's, also makes for a pleasant and consistent reading. For C., the ability to email books that are then delivered wirelessly to the Kindle was also a deciding feature, since she absolutely abhors having to connect the device to the computer for book management.

In conclusion, I think my choices for the eBook reader are like this: 1) Sony PRS-T1, 2) Nook Simple Touch, 3) Kindle Keyboard or Touch.