E-Readers--Which One?

When I decided I wanted an e-reader, I didn’t know which to choose. Early on, you couldn’t find one anywhere to put your hands on to see what they looked like. Then Sony and Nook made theirs available in retail locations. The first one I saw was the Sony at Office Depot. At the time, it didn’t have a live working model but only display sample that didn’t do anything. Later, I saw the Nook and the Kobo. What to do, what to do? I’d heard a lot of news about the Kindle, but I didn’t know anyone who owned one and they were not for sale in retail stores. It required a leap of faith to buy one online and hope for the best. In the interim, I downloaded the reader for PC from Kindle. It didn’t take me long to decide that wasn’t practical.

Just about the time I had the wherewithal to actually buy one, I made that leap of faith. But Kindles were on back order (What?! I’ve been waiting all this time, and now they’re on back order?). This reminded me of a bumper sticker I often saw on a car ahead of me while stuck in drive-time freeway traffic: The whole world is on back order. It turned out this was due to the new Kindle that was coming out, one that was more affordable and another with more muscle, but $189. About the same time, Nook had lowered their prices and also come out with a color model (ooh!), and the iPad has made its debut. I bought the 3G Kindle and I was in love. For the sake of practical hands-on comparison, I also bought the black-and-white Nook. If you’ve done any research into this, you know there are several considerations to, well, consider. Wireless or not, color or B&W, an e-reader that also doubles as a small touch screen computer, backlit or e-ink, etc.

Amazon and most other manufacturers have been rather coy about revealing their sales figures, so I decided to take it to the people. If you have an e-reader, which do you have? I’ve made it easy to join the fun with the handy-dandy poll here on this page. I’ll leave it up for a week and see what we get (and please be honest—this isn’t scientific but still . . . ).