Credit:
Reviewed / Betsey Goldwasser
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Credit:
Reviewed / Betsey Goldwasser
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This 7-inch e-reader is faster than previous models and has a higher contrast ratio, which measures how much brighter the white parts of the screen are. Read More
Buy, browse, and read e-books on its 7-inch glare-free “Kaleido 3” e-ink display. Read More
When it comes to the 2024-release Kindles, this one is lightweight, fast, and offers an excellent value for its price. Read More
Kobo Clara Color is a compact 6-inch device—perfect to slip into a clutch purse. Read More
The Boox Palma 2 is a tablet-like e-reader that can do more than competing devices. It's also narrow for one-handed use. Read More
While your social media feed may be flooded with posts that ask, “What to read?” there is also the debate about “What to read on?”
Paperbacks and hardcovers are fine, but they take up a lot of space in your travel bag or on a dusty bookshelf. You need to leave your home to buy books or wait for them to be delivered. You can’t adjust the font size or double-tap on a word for a dictionary definition. This is making e-readers sound pretty enticing, huh?
Tablets are also OK for reading e-books—but only while indoors. You can’t easily see your screen while outside, and schlepping that expensive slate to a pool or the beach is asking for trouble. Not to mention tablets can get heavy to hold, battery life isn’t great, and it’s easy to get distracted by email or social media notifications.
Thank us later, but we’ve researched and tested the best e-readers available right now. They’re relatively inexpensive, thin and lightweight, and can store thousands of e-books (you can download in seconds apiece). They’re conducive for reading indoors before bed or outdoors, most are waterproof, and battery life can last weeks or even months.
Have we sold you on picking up your first or next e-reader?
As for which one, you’ve got several good options, many of which we discuss here. Amazon’s Kindle devices are the most popular, each capable of carrying thousands of books, and sometimes audiobooks, magazines, and comics. Its largest model also includes a stylus pen to take notes, jot down ideas, or sketch images whenever and wherever creativity hits.
E-readers can vary greatly in price and features, so how do you choose one that’s right for you? Doing some research goes a long way, which should include reading our hands-on features at Reviewed.com, of course.
Screen size: In assessing your needs, size is the first thing you should consider. The more compact the screen (with most starting at about 6 inches), the easier it is to carry around and hold while reading, but you won’t be able to fit as many words on the page as larger e-readers. You can shrink the font so that you don’t turn pages as often, sure, but it needs to be comfortable for you to read.
Display quality: If you like to read in the dark, such as beside a sleeping partner, you won’t need an overhead light if the e-reader has a built-in front light. Most do, but not all of them will automatically turn on if they sense a dim environment. If you like the convenience of an e-reader that will do this for you, make sure it has that feature before you buy. Some have a “soft light” option, too, which filters out blue light, useful for reducing eye strain and improving sleep quality, especially when using the device in the evening.
Battery: Unlike smartphones, e-readers should typically last at least a couple of weeks on a single charge, but ideally more. Nearly all of the e-readers we tested have weeks of battery life.
Connectivity: All e-readers feature Wi-Fi connectivity, allowing users to access the internet and download books and other content directly to the device. (Only early Kindle models had cellular connectivity.) Some e-readers let you send books to the devices via email or other means, and most allow you to “side load” content when connected to a computer through its USB port.
Storage: Just like other tech you may own—like a smartphone, tablet, or laptop—the higher the number of gigabytes (GB) of storage, the more content you can hold on the e-reader. In other words, a 32GB model has twice the storage capacity of a 16GB model. But here’s the thing with e-readers: Books are tiny files, and so even an e-reader with 16GB of storage can hold thousands of books at the same time. And so, 16GB should be enough for most book lovers, but e-readers that double as audiobook players or note-taking devices (or those that support color books and magazines) tend to have more storage, as those files can be bigger.
Built-in software: Most e-readers have convenient features like an integrated dictionary—you can tap (or double-tap) on a word to read a definition—as well multi-language support and/or language conversion tools, annotation features (to highlight or mark up textbooks, and such), bookmarking and sharing capabilities (to send friends passages) and more.
File support: Many e-readers support a wide variety of file formats, but the most crucial are ePub for general purpose, .mobi, or .AZW3 for Kindle devices, as well as .txt and .pdf for other general files. Outside of those, any other file formats supported may come in handy, but they also may not, depending on what you plan to do with your device.
Waterproof: If you want to bring your e-reader to a beach or pool while on vacation, or you’re a bathtub reader, you must look for a waterproof e-reader. When shopping for a waterproof e-reader, look for one with an IPX8 water resistance rating, which means it can be submerged in up to 2 meters (about 6.5 feet) of freshwater for an hour at a time. It should be noted that being waterproof doesn’t mean your e-reader is corrosion-proof, so you should still take care when close to water.
Brand: Another important consideration is which brand to go with, as each has a different e-book store to download content from. Amazon Kindle, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble are the biggest platforms, plus, most let you borrow e-books from a public library with a valid library card (and audiobooks, too).
Audiobook support: Do you like listening to audiobooks for when you want to multitask, like when walking down the street or through an airport, or to be read a story when closing your eyes at night? A growing number of e-readers support audiobooks, whether it requires Bluetooth headphones or a speaker, or you can hear audio out of the device itself (or with wired headphones). Most e-readers that can play audiobooks work on Bluetooth.
You get the point. Along with looking at your budget, consider how and where you’ll be consuming content, and that should help whittle down your choices.
If you don’t mind reading off a smallish screen, smartphones can be a convenient way to read books because they’re pocket-sized. You likely bring your phone everywhere, anyway, and you might be able to squeeze in a few pages during the last few minutes of your lunch break or while in line at the supermarket (and apps can synchronize with your e-reader or tablet to continue on a larger screen later on).
Tablets are also great for reading books, so long as you’re inside. E-readers are more conducive to reading outdoors because of their non-glare e-ink screen. They’re lighter than tablets, the battery lasts for weeks, not hours, and many models are waterproof. Some people also don’t want to see notifications, like social media updates or email message pop-ups while reading, which you would still get on a phone.
E-readers don’t replace paper books—they merely supplement them.
Gifting a tangible hardcover book, perhaps with a personalized inscription, is a better (and more sentimental) gift than a voucher for a Kindle or Kobo e-book download. Many people like owning a bookcase with several dozen or hundreds of books they can lend to friends. You can drop off and/or take paperbacks and hardcover books from nearby “lending libraries” in parks or outside of homes on neighborhood streets. Paper books never run out of battery life or break down.
But e-readers have their benefits, too. For starters, they allow you to carry hundreds or thousands of titles at once—a boon when you’re traveling, say. They feature integrated night lights, the ability to change the font style and size, and the text margins, and built-in dictionaries. Some have audiobook support.
Lastly, e-readers all you to buy and download a book in mere seconds, without having to get up off the couch to visit a bookstore or wait for an Amazon delivery.
We contacted e-reader brands to request loan units for those we didn’t already have access to.
We gauged the overall experience, from the initial setup to reading e-books in various places (and in varying lighting conditions), assessing what the e-reader was like to hold and flip pages, and testing other features it may have (such as audiobook playback).
We downloaded books from official stores, including Amazon, and accessed books with a couple of supported subscription services. Full disclosure: Kobo sent a gift code to download content from its bookstore, too. I also “side loaded” one of the books I authored, in .epub format, and a .pdf, and some comics and magazines, as well.
Copious notes were taken on the experience for each of the e-readers reviewed for this feature. We considered who the right user for each product would be, such as a traveler, a beach or pool lover, a business professional, or a student who may want a notetaking device and e-reader in one, and so on.
For the inexpensive $100-ish e-readers, we wanted to know if some of the missing features, like a large and/or color screen, waterproofing, or Bluetooth connectivity, hampered the experience much.
Marc Saltzman has been a technology journalist for the past 30 years, and he has always been fascinated by the intersection of technology and entertainment, be it digital music trends, streaming video services, and Smart TVs, interactive entertainment (i.e., videogames), and yes, e-books and audiobooks.
To save you some time and trouble, we’ve gone ahead and researched what other competing publications and review sites are saying about e-readers.
Along with Reviewed and USA TODAY, Marc has been a freelance journalist for more than 20 publications, is a 16-time author (including Apple Watch For Dummies and Game Design: Secrets of the Sages), hosts the syndicated Tech It Out radio (and podcast), and is host of Tech Impact television show (on Bloomberg TV and FOX Business).
Based in Toronto, Marc specializes in consumer electronics, games and apps, smart home innovations, automotive tech, and future trends.
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