This is the second post in a series on ebooks and ereaders. The first of this series was on the pros and cons of ebooks. Now let’s assume that you’ve decided to buy an ebook reader. The first thing you notice is that there’s a lot of different ones, they do different things, take different files and are different sizes. So how do you choose? First you need to know some basics.  E-ink is the format you want for the screen, because anything backlit is the same as reading on a computer, ie hard on your eyes. Most of them are e-ink, but some cheaper ones aren’t. Not all ebook files are useable on all ereaders. The main ones are mobi files (can only be read on a Kindle unless you know a secret -see more below) and epub (can’t be read on a kindle).  PDF’s are accepted by most readers but they do strange things format wise in many of them, so epub is becoming the industry standard for non Kindle readers.  But if PDFs aren’t security protected, they can be changed into epub using a free … [Read more...]