The first thing I saw this morning when I was looking at tech news was this article:
The iPad is already more or less an e-book reader and web tablet, but because of it’s proprietary bending, we see immediate development work in order to enable it to handle Kindle and Nook proprietary formats, as well as to enable instant and user-friendly sales for Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
I think it’s funny that because of the lack of a true standard and due to various competing DRM practices, once you have spent gobs of cash on your new tablet reader hardware, you will need to immediately download apps that will allow it to also become an e-book reader, or an e-book reader.
Still, between the two designated devices, I still lean toward the Nook. I big reason for this is the longevity factor based on little things like having a replaceable battery and being an Android-based device.
I used a Sony PDA years ago as more or less an e-book reader, and it worked out really well. At the time, I was able to convert several of my textbooks to PDF easily, and some were even forward-thinking enough to provide a standard PDF of the text in the purchase of the textbook. I loved having a backpack’s worth of books available in the palm of my hand, being able to read my assigned chapters one-handed while on transit on the way to and from work each day, and being able to both highlight and make annotations. It made the commute productive, and after getting home, was able to streamline time on research papers and workgroup discussions because I’d already got the reading in.
When between classes, I was able to use the PDA similarly for extracurricular reading. At the time, it was the Harry Potter series, some older Asimov titles, and a load of CS journals.
If I’d had to wrestle with DRM with each of these, I don’t know how I would have had the time at all. Between getting notations synced, getting different titles moved back and forth, and keeping up with all I was working on at the time, the headaches that I hear people struggling with as a symptom of DRM would have been way too much.