Sales...Sales...Sales

[jumpuphigh]

Here in the US, this week starts our bargain shopping season.  I thought I'd throw up a post for people to post any ebook-related deals that they find.

I'll start.

Best Buy has the B&N Nook Wireless on sale for $99.99.  They are already sold out online but the ad says that each store is guaranteed to have at least 10 in stock to start.

ETA:  Best Buy has these in stock online.
Pandigital - Novel Digital Book $139.99
The Sharper Image - Literati Digital Reader $119.99
Velocity Micro Cruz Digital Reader $159.99

CVS has the Shift3 LookBook Wireless Read on sale for $118.88.  It looks like they still have them in stock online.

Comments

[elf]

Newegg has several ebook readers on sale, including the Jetbook Lite for $89. (5" screen, LCD; extensive file support but possibly no DRM'd ebooks.)

Fry's sells the Sony Pocket for $113. (The 300, not the newer 350. 5" screen, e-ink; Adobe DE DRM, PDF, ePub, RTF, TXT.) May only be available in stores.

Skytek Primer 7 Color eBook Reader & Media Player for $90 at ecost.com. (I've never heard of this one. LCD screen; likely no DRM support.)

As the new wave of ebook readers hit the market, last year's models are on sale in a lot of places. I've seen refurbished Nooks at ebay for $80. (They're sold out now.)

[jumpuphigh]

I haven't heard of a lot of these - both the ones you listed and the ones I listed.

I was thinking last night as I was futzing with my elibrary that I wanted to let you know that when I hit 200 books on my Sony 650, it had a noticeable delay in starting up. However, it was only a few seconds so I am guessing that the new models are able to handle greater numbers of books than the older models.

[elf]

I keep about 400 books on my 505, and there's an annoying delay on startup after charging or loading new books on it. I gather the newer versions have faster processors, but still have the delay; it's a function of how they rebuild the library every time you add/subtract books. Gah. It's part of why I want an Astak Pocket Pro; I'm just not willing to pay almost twice as much for it. (And the nifty colors aren't available right now. I gather there's some contract hangup preventing them from selling from their own site, and there's only one or two online stores that have them.)

I keep meaning to do a breakdown of the EReader Chart of Doom with *useful* info instead of the GAAA FOREVER DATA chart. Possibly broken down by company instead of screen size.

[amalthia]

On the 650 I have 1000 ebooks on it and last time it crashed and rebooted it only took 5 minutes to reload which is a BIG difference from my previous 505 which took about 40 minutes. I'd say the processor was a big upgrade, or my 505 had issues and I didn't know it. :)

[jumpuphigh]

With 1000 books, how close are you to filling your memory?

[amalthia]

I still have about 581 MB of space left but to clear most of what I have on my device is fan fiction and it's zipped into an epub container. When I was using mostly RTFs those took up A lot more space. And most fan fiction is between 20-50k words which is much shorter than the average traditional novel.

[jumpuphigh]

I have almost exclusively used epub (except for a few PDFs that don't translate well to epub) and only about 13% of what I have is fanfic so that's good information to have. Eventually, I'm thinking about organizing my library on SD cards but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

[amalthia]

Yeah I was a bit worried that 1.5 gigs wouldn't be enough for my fan fiction collection. On my previous device I used a microSD card but I'm trying to avoid having to use one on this device because I think it goes much faster if everything is on the internal memory card.

[jumpuphigh]

I just did a test run with 302 books. It took 23 seconds to start up after I disconnected it from my computer.

[tameiki]

The books you have on your 650, is that on the ebook reader itself, or is that on an SD memory card? Just curious :)

[jumpuphigh]

That's on the reader itself. I expect to be moving books to memory cards within a month or two. :D

[tameiki]

Thanks for the information. I only put books on my SD card so I haven't seen any time lag booting up my 650 other than a couple of seconds for it to read the card and get it going :)

[jumpuphigh]

I was wondering how booting with books on a card would be. How many books do you normally have on a card?

[tameiki]

On a 4 gig SDHC card, right now I have around 500 books on it but I'm always adding as I collect more. The reader takes around 3 to 5 seconds to get the card up to speed once the initial boot up is done. All in all, it doesn't take enough time to really think about :)