What's on your e-reader?

[Karl Henning]

Oh and here is my review (I also posted this on amazon):

I have owned the Kindle 3, Kindle 4, Kindle Touch, Nook Simple Touch, Nook Simple Touch with Glowlight, Kindle Fire, Nook Color and Nook Tablet. And while that list is far from a complete survey, I have seen a broad range of popular ereaders. And I claim that this Paperwhite is better than all of them for me!

Ghosting: I don't need to refresh every page now like I do with the older Kindles because I don't see any ghosting.

Fonts: Increasing the resolution allows the ereader to display excellent serif fonts such as Baskerville instead of the mediocre standard of previous Kindles. While the Nook offered other fonts, they were really variations on a central font. This is one area where until now tablets reigned supreme.

Capacitive Touch: Still not as snappy and responsive as a phone or tablet, it is significantly more responsive than the previous IR touch and now you can use a stylus and not smudge your screen. I wish though that the device could be configured to only respond to swipes instead of tapping to turn pages. That way accidental turn pages wouldn't happen.

The Light: I don't use it at max settings in the dark like some people. I only use it to make the screen look white. I use the smallest setting in the dark, and in general in a dimly lit room only use the lowest settings. I use the medium setting in a brightly lit room. My goal is to make the screen look white without looking like it glows. If you set it that way the slight uniformity problems are not apparent; and the screen looks like white paper. Also while the light in the Nook Glo is skewed towards blueish, the white of the light on this Kindle looks like a fairly neutral 6500k white. The most neutral white still belongs to the Nook Tablet. FYI the light on this device can not be turned off. The minimum setting might appear to be off, just go into a dark room and you will see that the Kindle still glows. The light only turns off when you put the kindle to sleep. Now I didn't expect to use the light, but it works so well that I consider it essential now. Much better contrast than the older kindles.

Native Contrast: Very slightly better than the older pearl screen Kindles. It might be within tolerance the same (you might even buy one slightly worse than the older Kindle). It is really the light that improves contrast, if you want to buy this purely for a boost in native contrast I wouldn't bother.

Time to Read: When it comes to location numbers, page numbers and real page numbers, all I ever cared about was how long will this take to read? I liked page numbers because I had an intuition for mapping that measure to time to read. I grew to like location numbers after I built a similar intuition for timing. By changing the measure to directly assess time to read based on your reading speed, that intermediate measure is gone. This is the best way to keep track of where I am and where I'm going in an ebook. I love it! In fact I consider it the best feature out of everything listed above.

Is the Kindle Paperwhite worth buying if you don't have a Kindle? Yes. Is it worth an upgrade over a previous Kindle? Yes. Is it worth buying if you're invested into another ecosystem (Nook, Kobo, Apple, Sony etc)? No. It's still about the reading and you should not have to rebuy your ebooks, nor should you have to crack DRM.

Nicely done, Davey : )

[petrarch]

Is the Kindle Paperwhite worth buying if you don't have a Kindle? Yes. Is it worth an upgrade over a previous Kindle? Yes.

If the Paperwhite was available in the size of the DX, I would most definitely upgrade. Until then, the DX is it for me (I read a lot of PDFs and the generous size of the DX is perfect for them).

[DavidW]

If the Paperwhite was available in the size of the DX, I would most definitely upgrade. Until then, the DX is it for me (I read a lot of PDFs and the generous size of the DX is perfect for them).

I don't think that will happen.  I think that it is good that you bought it while you can because it is more likely that the DX will simply be discontinued then revamped.  I agree that the size and dimensions make the DX perfect for pdfs, and the rest of the eink readers are really not.  Even though there are many people that need or want to read pdfs, I think that most of them turn to the similarly priced tablets.

When I wrote what I wrote I just completely forgot about the DX users.  It was wrong of me to say that it is worth an upgrade over any previous kindles.