Amazon Kindle alternatives you can buy right now

Posted by T3 Magazine on Wed 7 Oct 2009

Kindle confirmed in the UK, but what else is there?

Having eluded eager eBookworms for some time now, the Amazon Kindle is finally set to go on sale in the UK. While the Kindle has been something of a noticeable no-show over here, Amazon's rivals have taken the opportunity to grab your digital reading attention instead.

Surveying the competition the Kindle faces when it hits the shelves, read below to see our round-up of the best eBook readers you can buy right now

Sony Reader PRS-700

Price: £300

Sony’s third-gen Reader keeps its trademark leather cover, which makes it look more scholarly than other, lower-rent ebooks. Its six-inch, e-ink touchscreen boasts a backlight for nocturnal reading and you can also annotate text and make notes using its virtual keyboard. The 512MB memory stores 160 books – add up to a 32GB SDHC memory card for plenty more.

Buy one here: www.sony.co.uk

Cool-er

Price: £190

Despite weighing just 178g and being only 0.42 inches thick, you can fit thousands of ebooks on the Cool-er’s 4GB SD card. There’s no internal internet access, so you won’t be able to top up your bookshelf on the go, but it’s cheap, it comes in red, blue, two shades of pink, silver, violet, green and black, and it looks like an absolutely enormous iPod Nano.

Buy one here: www.coolreaders.co.uk

Amazon Kindle DX

Price: $279

The DX’s auto-rotating, 9.7-inch touchscreen is perfect for magazines and newspapers. There’s a PDF reader and support for other formats, so you’re not restricted to Amazon’s titles. You can add notes on the QWERTY keyboard, or order the latest bestseller using built-in 3G. Books download in under 60 seconds. Or they will once the service launches in the UK…

Buy one here: www.amazon.com

Elonex Ereader

Price: £189

Exclusive to Borders, this one comes with 100 ebooks pre-loaded, with space for 1,000 on the 512MB internal memory, or thousands more on SD. It’s fairly bog-standard – a six-inch, e-ink screen that you can magnify text on, and a bookmark function – but easy access to Borders’ extensive book selection makes it better than your average potboiler.

Buy one here: www.borders.co.uk

IREX Digital Reader 1000S

Price: £600

The IREX’s 10.2-inch display dwarves the other devices here and makes it ideal for reading magazines and other periodicals. Sign up for PressReader and you’ll get a selection of major newspapers from all over the world sent straight to your IREX. You can scribble notes on-screen using the stylus, and the SD slot provides space for plenty of cutting-edge news.

Buy one here: www.iliadreader.co.uk

Foxit eSlick

Price:

With its ultra-low power consumption, the eSlick manages up to 8,000 page turns on a single charge, so you can flick through the Bible or the latest Marina Cole multiple times without taking a break. It can also view PDFs and convert printable fi les to PDF using the in-built Foxit PDF Creator. Add a 4GB SD card and you can cram an entire library into its 0.4-inch-thick frame.

Buy one here: www.foxitsoftware.com