How to choose an e‑book for yourself or as a gift | Articles | Gadgets, gifts and accessories

Do you want to read more and more, and the price of paper copies is grow­ing every day? It is worth think­ing about buy­ing an e‑reader, which will save you a lot of mon­ey in the long run. We have com­piled a list of the main points to con­sid­er when choos­ing your first e‑reader.

Screen size

The stan­dard read­er size is 6 inch­es (a lit­tle over 15 cm). Enough to read fic­tion. But if you are a com­ic book lover, the screen will be small.

Here’s what a com­ic page looks like on a 6‑inch Kin­dle Paper­white:

With a good mem­o­ry and screen, you can read not only books. Source: Vic­to­ria Sokolo­va, abc.ru

More con­ve­nient mod­els with a diag­o­nal of 7–8 inch­es. This is almost a tablet: they have a built-in back­light, Wi-Fi con­nec­tion and blue­tooth.
Cons: They are more expen­sive. If you need a read­er with­out unnec­es­sary fea­tures, it makes no sense to over­pay for only 1–2 inch­es.

Read­ers with a diag­o­nal of 9 to 13 inch­es are most often need­ed for read­ing tech­ni­cal texts. On such books, pic­tures or the same comics are per­fect­ly vis­i­ble, but they will no longer fit in an ordi­nary ladies’ hand­bag.

You can also find very small ver­sions, 5 inch­es. Plus, these “kids” are com­pact and do not take up much space in a bag or back­pack.

The down­side is that you have to turn pages often. From this you quick­ly get tired and stop con­cen­trat­ing on read­ing.

Exam­ples:

Pock­et­Book 627 Mat­te Sil­ver, 6 inch­es: from 10,999 rubles

Pock­et­Book 740 InkPad 3 Pro, 7’8 inch­es: from 16,780 rubles

Pock­et­Book X, 10’3 inch­es: from 24,480 rubles

Screen type

The screen in an e‑reader is very dif­fer­ent from the screen of a tablet or smart­phone. Smart­phones and tablets use light-emit­ting LCD and OLED screen tech­nolo­gies. Because of this, your eyes get tired faster, espe­cial­ly if you read in the dark.
Read­ers install black and white e‑ink dis­plays, in which the back­light is arranged dif­fer­ent­ly. Light diodes in e‑books are locat­ed around the perime­ter, which is why the eyes see the image in reflect­ed light. There­fore, read­ing on read­ers is felt by the eyes of a per­son in the same way as on a paper book.

Com­par­i­son of iPad tablet and Kin­dle read­er at 26x mag­ni­fi­ca­tion. Source: osxdaily.com

Dif­fer­ences in res­o­lu­tion, pic­ture clar­i­ty and price. Here are the main types:

• E‑ink card. The lat­est gen­er­a­tion of dis­plays. The res­o­lu­tion of Car­ta is 1024 × 758, the same as that of its old­er broth­er Pearl HD. But the cre­ators have improved the con­trast ratio to 15:1. On such a screen, the let­ters will be clear­er and the lines will no longer merge so much. It seems like a small thing, but if you decide to read all night long, your eyes won’t get as tired as they could.
• E‑ink Pearl. The old man of the gen­er­a­tion and the guy who sur­vived because he is still active­ly sold on var­i­ous sites. It has a low res­o­lu­tion — 800 × 600. From the pros — low price, from the minus­es — the let­ters often look fuzzy, the lines are some­times smeared.
• E‑ink Pearl HD. An updat­ed ver­sion with a res­o­lu­tion of 1024 × 758. New read­ers on Pearl and Pearl HD are almost nev­er released, which means that such read­ers could lie in win­dows and ware­hous­es for years. There­fore, their bat­ter­ies will not hold a charge for a long time and con­sci­en­tious­ly.

Exam­ples:

Read­er Book 2, E‑ink Pearl: from 3,990 rubles
Xiao­mi iRead­er T6, E‑ink Car­ta: from 15,990 rubles

Touch screen

There are two types of read­ers: with mechan­i­cal and touch con­trol. If you are used to a tablet or smart­phone, take an e‑book with touch con­trols.

Push-but­ton read­ers are also con­ve­nient, the main thing is to look at the loca­tion of the keys. But­tons should be designed so that they can be switched with one hand on occa­sion.

Supported formats and ways to download files

It is bet­ter to know in advance which for­mat your read­er will be able to read. Most Pop­u­lar:

• FB2 and EPUB. Sup­port­ed by most e‑books. Files in these for­mats are small and can be archived, which means they save mem­o­ry.
• DJVU and PDF. DJVU uses scanned doc­u­ments. This for­mat is espe­cial­ly con­ve­nient for stu­dents. There are many comics and tech­ni­cal lit­er­a­ture in PDF, the for­mat is main­ly used when you need to save pic­tures.
• DOC and TXT. Word and Notepad for­mats. On many read­ers, if they open, then with hiero­glyphs.

Down­load books via wi-fi or blue­tooth. Source: pixabay.com

Wire­less way. If the read­er has wi-fi, down­load­ing files is much faster and there is no need to fid­dle with wires. There are a num­ber of oth­er use­ful things:

• You can imme­di­ate­ly go to the library site and down­load the book in the desired for­mat.
• Some read­ers work on Android, so you can install appli­ca­tions for read­ing books on them by sub­scrib­ing to a month­ly sub­scrip­tion.

Through the cord. Con­nect the device with a USB cable or via a USB flash dri­ve to a com­put­er and trans­fer files. Noth­ing com­pli­cat­ed, but much longer than via Wi-Fi.

Exam­ples:

Dig­ma E63W, USB: from 4,490 rubles
Pock­et­Book 740, Wi-Fi: from 17,999 rubles

Memory

Basi­cal­ly, even the most bud­getary young read­ers have up to 8 GB of mem­o­ry, of which approx­i­mate­ly 1–1.5 GB is giv­en to the sys­tem. As a result, the user receives approx­i­mate­ly 6.5 GB. A stan­dard book in FB2 for­mat takes up approx­i­mate­ly 0.5 MB of the total weight. It turns out that even 6.5 GB of mem­o­ry can add more than 12 thou­sand books. Enough for a long time.

There are read­ers with 32 or 64GB of mem­o­ry, in which you can store not only a huge library, but also music. For exam­ple, in Pock­et­Book 740 Pro and Pock­et­Book X it is con­ve­nient to lis­ten to audio books.

Summarizing

• The opti­mal size for read­ing fic­tion is 6 inch­es;
• Accord­ing to the type of screen, it is bet­ter to choose E‑ink Car­ta;
• The sen­sor is more con­ve­nient if you are used to a tablet or smart­phone;
• The most pop­u­lar file for­mats are FB2, EPUB and PDF;

If the device will be used only for read­ing books, 8 GB will suf­fice.