Kindle vs. Sony Ebooks?

I’m battling my inner book lover when it comes to the competition that has developed between ebook devices sold by Sony and Amazon.  With Amazon’s new “Kindle” being released, the market has suddenly gotten very competitive and for the first time, I’m excited about ebooks.

Ebooks aren’t new but their acceptance has been lukewarm over the past few years.  That’s because not enough titles were available and the format for the books wasn’t standard.  The formatting standard is still in process and I hope will eventually develop much like audio music has with the MP3 format.

As an avid bibliophile I collect many books.  I recently moved our church office back into my home and cleaned out at least three cases of books to donate to the library or give to others who might enjoy them.  These were books I had not touched in the two years since I moved into the office I was now vacating.  I figured many of those I would never read again.  Even so, I have many books in cases I’m still unboxing and putting up on shelves in my home and I realize that in the next decade as my kids grow up and my wife and I downsize into a smaller home, I’m going to have to clear out more books and keep only those I feel are essential.

Enter the ebook.  With the competition between Sony and Amazon, my hope is that in the future, I can purchase my books in an ebook format that I can keep on memory sticks and not take up too much space.  The Kindle appears to be the most promising since it stores your book purchases online ala Web 2.0.  If your Kindle ever goes down, you can easily reload it after a reboot by checking in at Amazon and having your bookshelf sent back to you.  My problem with both devices is the price.  At $400 for a Kindle, you have to take some time purchasing books before you break even.  Considering I pay on average $20 per hardback book, I’d have to buy 40 books at Amazon’s $10 price for Kindle Books before I’d break even on my purchase. Sony’s “reader” is $100 cheaper but the books for it average $12 a piece so you would have to buy just under 40 books to break even there.  Even at that, both devices are not backlit so you still have to treat reading from them like you would a traditional book. 

Features?  The Kindle’s oversized buttons look like a problem and the early reviews I’m seeing online are proving this out.  Many complain that you can’t hold the thing without tripping a button, and thus, turning pages.  Sony’s reader doesn’t have this problem.  I like it’s button layout better.  BUT….Kindle has the advantage over Sony in that you can purchase books directly from the Kindle and have them delivered to you in about 1 minute.  That’s quite handy.  I like that the Kindle has wireless access and you don’t need another computer to load it.  With Sony, you have to buy books online and then transfer them into the book reader.  Both devices feature font adjustment so every book you buy can become a “large print” book should your eyes start to hurt or, in my case, you have vision problems to begin with.

So what to do?  My book loving self wants one but my common sense person says nope.  I think I’ll wait for the Kindle 2.0 (or whatever they will call it) to be released.  It will likely be cheaper and the button problem will most likely be fixed.   By then, we should see if the format for Kindle books has improved and more books should also be available.  When that happens, I might seriously consider an investment of my best books in ebook format and begin clearing my shelves even more for a time in the future when I will need to downsize significantly.