Friday, November 23, 2007

Free ebook reader

Join an ebook club get the reader for free.

Filament has set itself up as Amazon's Kindle competitor. Not as advanced but a lot cheaper. For $19.95 a month you get the ebook reader and two books a month. One year contract required which can also be paid as a one-time payment of $199.95. I would have to check out the display which is a big feature on Kindle. Other than the automatic renewal I don't see any bad features of this plan.

Another interesting idea I had for an ebook reader plus is OLPC XO. Not designed really as an ebook reader but has a good display. How easy would it download and how well would it display ebooks?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The amazing thing about filament is that it uses the ebookwise 1150 /gemstar/rocketbook device which was produced in 2001. I say this not as a kind of criticism; it was a great device with backlighting and outstanding battery life. You could probably buy it today for 80-110$. It had one of the best form factors I had ever seen. I dropped mine and ruined the display, so that's why I don't use it anymore. (Also, it was rather hard finding the memory cards for it, which was a really big deal).

That said, ebook readers now have much improved capabilities (although the exterior design of the gemstar/rocketbook is still the nicest).

If you can wait until summer, you can probably buy a gen 2 e-ink device for about $150. (See my post about it here . Right now, they're all in the $300-400 range.

I think the XO/OLPC will also turn out to be good for reading PDFs (something Kindle cannot do).

As for reading most rss feeds, I think that pda's are fine. you don't really need a kindle for that.