E-Book Reader Reviews Need To Consider More Than Just The Hardware

The Kindle e-book reader has been enormously successful for Amazon. It was initially launched in November of 2007 – but it wasn′t until the launch of the Kindle 2, in February 2009, that e-book readers began to take off. Amazon followed up with the release of the large format Kindle DX in June of 2009, and the e-book reader market began to grow very rapidly indeed.

The Kindle quickly became Amazon′s best selling product. During the festive season of 2009 it became the “most gifted” Amazon product ever. Inevitably, a number of other manufacturers either launched, or updated, their own e-book readers. Increased competition drove prices down and provided customers with additional options – both of these are good things of course.

With increased choices available, prospective e-book reader buyers need a way to compare the different available options. It’s certainly possible to find a lot of reviews on the Internet which compare the Sony Daily Edition with the Kindle reader, the iPad with the Nook reader etc. However, making comparisons between e-book readers solely in terms of the hardware is not entirely representative of the e-book reader experience. As a rule, and in common with any piece of personal electronic equipment, the most recently released model will tend to have more features and functions than older models. To get a proper idea of how e-book readers compare with each other, factors such as display readability, control layout and usability, availability of books, price of books, ease of connection and purchasing of books etc all require to be considered.

Although some of these factors are subjective and may be a matter of personal taste, others may be analysed objectively and included in the decision-making process when choosing which e-book reader to buy. When it comes to the number of books available, the Amazon Kindle has a distinct advantage. There are over 420,000 titles on Amazon′s website at the moment, and that number is growing every day.

A recent study by the New York Times looked at the cost of ten books – the NYT’s nominated ten best books of 2009, five fiction and five non-fiction titles – on three different e-book readers, the Kindle, the Nook and the Sony reader. The ten Kindle books cost a total of $ 136.87 – an average of $ 13.69 per title. The same ten books bought from Sony’s store produced an average price of $ 15.26 and Barnes and Noble worked out at a staggering average price per book of $ 19.29.

Therefore, based upon these figures, if you read a book a week, you would save almost $300 every year by buying a Kindle instead of the Nook. What that would mean, is that your Kindle reader would not only pay for itself, but would leave you with a few dollars spare to buy some books in less than a year. Currently there are a lot of discussions taking place between e-book retailers and the major publishing houses. It may be that e-book prices may be subject to change in future. However, it seems obvious that any prospective e-book buyer would do well to consider not only the availability of books but their price level before deciding upon which e-book reader to buy.

Get more information on the Amazon Kindle – and have a look at the wide range of Kindle accessories available to help you both protect and personalise your reader.