Amazon Kindle vs. Other (Cheaper) eBook Readers

The Amazon Kindle is undoubtedly the most popular e-book reader currently available on the market, not only because of its wide range of features but also because of the huge selection of hundreds of thousands of e-books for sale on their site as well as the close to two million free e-books that you can download that have fallen out of copyright, including classics such as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

The But (There's Always A But)

That said, for many people, price is still the main reason that they haven't bought a Kindle. Even though prices have fallen sharply and you can now buy a Kindle for less than $150, there are more affordable e-book readers available on the market that can do the job just as well as a Kindle, at a fraction of the price. The main problem with these cheaper e-book readers is that they lack the rich feature set that the Kindle has; but if you're just going to read e-books, these devices will do the job.

The Upside of the "Cheapies"

The main advantage of many cheaper e-book readers is that they can read many e-book formats, unlike Kindle and other more prominent readers that usually only work with content utilizing their proprietary formats. Having this freedom means that you can buy e-books from a variety of sources, not just from the e-book reader vendor's site. Among the formats a cheap e-book reader should be able to support include EPub, PDF and TXT, as well as providing support for DRM-protected e-book files.

If you plan to use your e-book reader to read newspapers and magazines, you might want to get one that has image support, meaning that it can display photos and illustrations. Most affordable e-book readers support at least JPEG, although others can support GIF, BMP and other formats.

And The Downside…

The main disadvantage of cheap e-book readers is that they usually have no wireless access, and you have to download the books to your computer first before transferring them to the reader. In addition, they may also not have rechargeable batteries or lots of built-in memory (although you can expand storage capacity with a memory card). But despite these limitations, these readers will still let you enjoy the experience of reading e-books without having to shell out a lot of money.

In Conclusion

Ultimately it comes down to two factors: budget and requirements. If you have a limited budget, a cheaper eBook reader will be the better option. If you've got a larger budget and perhaps desire the extra niceties, the Amazon Kindle may be just the one for you…


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Written By Derek Jansen @ Amazon Promotional Codes. Discover how to get up to $75 in Amazon Promo Codes in our latest video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5gQCJIjMF4