Advice on ebook readers please.

Does anyone provide good advice / links on a decent ebook reader, please?

Portable - essential, as is good battery life.

Back-lit - preferred (switchable for night-time only really).

Have seen some before that looks like you 'turn' pages by swiping the virtual pages.


any ideas / link / recommendations greatly appreciated.

TIA folks. .

You can either have good battery life and a good user experience or you can have it back-lit with poor battery life and not so good a user experience.

Still very happy with my Kindle.

That is fair enough - it's best with good battery life, and that's that.

My Mum was asking about this, and I don't have a clue about them. A Kindle shall do nicely.

Any point in the one with the keyboard?

TVM for the advice, gomezz.

It isn't backlit but... the Kindle.. 100% its amazing. Bought my wife one for Xmas last year, just bought the one without the keyboard for myself.

My wife and I both got Kindles to take on holiday (3 weeks) - lots of reading, needed charging once because we didn't turn off the WiFi bit. Easy to read and load up, some of the free books are pretty good. My wife has dreadful eyesight but upping the font size made it really easy, in bright sun she could just about get away without her glasses. The keyboard is not particularly useful but it lets you put a password on the device if that's of any interest, and to type in words to search for - doing it with the '5-way' control would be a real pain. Also allows some web browsing but it's pretty awful at present. Personally, I think I'd stick to the keyboard model. Strictly for demographic reference (since it's for your Mum), we're both in our 60's, my wife is not particularly PC literate and she got on really well with her Kindle.

In reply to a post by Guest_Again:

i]Any point in the one with the keyboard?

It was the only model available until recently so that was the one I got. Useful for browsing the web but it is very rudimentary and a pain beyon doing a brief email / news / weather check although I have used it at motorsports events to show the live timing screen.

The Kindle is brilliant!

The battery lasts for ages if you don't switch the wireless on (for connecting to Web), and even if you do it's not too bad.

It's no great bother pressing a button to turn pages and it saves a helluva lot of power over swiping the virtual pages to turn them.

I find the keyboard useful for searching back in the book I'm reading to find names/events that I've forgotten, as well as using it for a bit of web browsing, like checking my emails while I'm on holiday or even internet banking to move cash into my Euros supplying account.

Kindle is good, there are other ebook readers from Sony etc but not sure what they are like. I believe even Asda brought one out recently! I`ve had a look at the one with out keybaord and that is probably all you need if your going to read! As others have said battery life is long which is what you want.

The other advantage of not swiping the screen to turn pages etc is that it keeps it cleaner with no greasy finger marks.

I got a Kobo, from WHsmith, light, good battery life, loads of books from Kobo. Lots of free books.

some people say it is a bit slow at changing pages, but I don't find it so. I got the Kobo because I could try it out in Smiths.

Back-lit is a bad idea for ebook readers as your eyes will strain, it will be like watching a computer monitor for a long time without a break.


E-ink is the best to go for.