Time Magazine takes a look at the wide variety of digital devices one can use to read.
From the piece...
I have a lifelong friend — let's call her Mom — who used to sneer at the very notion of e-books. Then she got an Amazon.com Kindle as a gift and sheepishly discovered that she adored it. But when her Kindle broke, she started reading the e-books she'd already bought from Amazon on her BlackBerry, using the Kindle app available for that phone. And she quickly realized that the phone that was already her constant companion was the ideal e-reader for her.
She's got plenty of company. Stand-alone e-readers still have their place: I like the Kindle (which starts at $139) and Barnes & Noble's Nookcolor ($249), both of which pack nice screens into booklike form factors. (The Kindle's E Ink technology has the additional benefit of letting you read for weeks on a battery charge.) Still, if you own a laptop and a smart phone — and maybe even a tablet such as Apple's iPad or Samsung's Galaxy Tab — one more portable device with a display may be one too many.
A well-rounded e-bookstore should offer free applications that let you read the titles you buy on major computer, tablet and phone platforms. It should also be well stocked with the books you're most likely to want. For the moment, that rules out Apple's iBooks, which has a limited selection and is available only on the iPad and iPhone. It also eliminates the Windows-only Blio, founded by tech visionary Ray Kurzweil. And while Google's recently introduced eBookstore claims 3 million titles and has apps for iPhone, iPad and Android, along with a browser-based reader that works on Windows PCs and Macs, its selection of best-selling fiction was skimpy when I visited this week. (Just six of the New York Times' top 15 hardcover novels were available.)
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