I’ve tried using a few different dedicated ebook readers. They suck; they are much worse than paper books. But I do like using my Palm handheld as an ebook reader, especially at night in bed with the backlight on. I bought a Sony Clie T615C with a color 320 x 320 screen for about $75 used. I see they’re going for less than $50 on eBay now. A great deal for a 16MB device.<\/p>\n
The screen is about 2.5 x 2.5 inches and it’s at least as legible as a computer screen, if not more. The pixels are very small and the characters are very sharp. This high resolution is key for reading — the kind of screen that comes with the Treo 600, for example, is no good for long texts. Any Palm device will work, but standard low resolution (160×160) makes it more difficult to read. The Sonys and the Palm Tungsten have that satisfying high resolution (320×320).<\/p>\n
The free Palm Reader allows bookmarking, searching, and note-taking. It’s a great little app. Invisible until you need it. To turn the page, you just tap the screen (there are several other ways to turn the page).<\/p>\n
The best place to buy ebooks for handhelds is from Palm Digital Media, which sells ebooks for Palm and Windows handhelds. Palm Digital has lots of the books I want, like Steven Johnson’s Mind wide Open, and Bill Bryson’s A Brief History of Nearly Everything. The prices are good, too. Mind Wide Open costs $13.49 here. It’s $17.50 on Amazon in paper. Best of all, there’s no waiting for the book to show up in the mail — you get it the instant you pay for it. I’ve read a couple of dozen books this way, and have come to resent having to use real books, which now seem too heavy to have to hold up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Cheap, readable ebook device<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"0","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[32,235],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=391"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}