Read in comfort with this great cheap ebook reader stand

The nice thing about a book is that you can pop it on a stand at just the right angle for your own reading pleasure and read away to your heart’s content without having to hold it. Well if you’re addicted to your ebook reader (and who isn’t??) and want to make long reading sessions that bit less tiring on the hands and arms, then this great cheap ebook reader stand might be just the job.

This little ebook reader stand is actually sold as a stand for notebook computers, but it’s none the worse for that. You can actually use it to help prevent injury to your wrists when doing a lot of typing on your netbook or notebook by angling the keyboard to make it more comfortable. But it’s as an ebook reader stand that it comes into its own for me.

Ideal for older people who don’t have the wrist and hand strength they once had, this ebook reader stand is also great for youngies like myself who like to read for hours on end on a comfortable recliner with my ebook reader on the little table next to me. Believe me, you won’t know the comfort till you’ve tried it.

For around a tenner – and that includes postage – you can’t go wrong with this brilliant little ebook reader stand.

Shootout for back to college reading – cheap ebook reader vs cheap netbook

Now we’ve all got a cheap netbook – or if we haven’t we’ll surely be getting one before school or college starts again in a few weeks time. Wow how the hols have flown by!

And a lot of students use their netbook for absolutely everything.

Netbook for watching vids or movies, netbook for listening to music, netbook for typing assignments and essays, and especially netbook for reading books and coursework. Most texts are available in ebook versions nowadays, and most students – either at school or uni – have their texts on their netbook in ebook form – not to mention the latest Harry Potter!

But the key thing about an eink screen as opposed to even the best TFT displays is that the eink screen has no backlight. And no backlight equals no eyestrain. It’s just a fact that you can’t read for as long on your netbook as you can on anebook reader. And it’s also a fact that students have to do an awful lot of reading.

So compared with even the  best netbook displays like that on the Samsung N110 netbook (a fabulous netbook for students) it’s just less strain on the eye.

An ebook reader is smaller than a netbook, so you can pop it in your pocket, and carry it about everywhere. And since electronic books (ebooks) are minute compared with MP3s, your ebook reader can hold hundreds of books (or thousands with the optional SD card).

Plug the ebook reader into a USB port on your netbook upload your coursebooks, dictionaries , and you’re away. And because it only uses power when actually doijng  something like turning pages rather than reading,  your ebook reader needs charging once a week or less rather than every few hours as with the netbook.

It’s simply a matter of the right tools for the job. Watch vids, listen to MP3s, surf the net and Skype with your netbook. But do your all your coursework and leisure reading on your ebook reader. I don’t know many students now who don’t adopt this eye-friendly approach.

And as we posted earlier, we’ve got the cheapest place on the net Sony’sebook reader.

Buy one now and, you’ll be well prepared  for  back to college or back to school.  Check it out below.

Try this mains USB charger for your ebook reader

Ebook readers charge their batteries by USB.

Now you’d normally do this by connecting your ebook reader to one of the USB ports your PC, but there are always times when we’re not near a PC and the battery on our ebook reader is fading.

Enter the mains USB charger.    For less than a tenner, this brilliant little charger plugs into the mains, so no computer needed, and connects to your ebook reader by means of your normal USB cable.

Now I know that your ebook reader battery lasts for ages between charges, but just pop this little charger in your bag or backpack when you go on holiday or on that business trip and you’ll never need to worry about how to recharge your reader again. I often find it’s easier to recharge my ebook battery by plugging this into the nearest electrical mains socket than to interrupt what I’m doing and connect to my PC.

And another benefit of the mains USB charger is that you can still use your reader while it’s charging. If you charge from your computer’s USB port, then as you know your reading has to come to a halt. But with the mains charger, just carry on reading as normal. And instead of 12 hours or so for a full charge, your reader usually gets fully tanked up in less than four hours.

Get one, you’ll wonder how you ever did without it.

And if the makers of ebook readers had any sense, they’d supply one of these great little battery chargers with every ebook.

Share your ebook reader with an SD memory card

Ebook readers can hold loads and loads of books – that’s one of the nice things about the printed word being so small in electronic terms. A writer’s whole lifetime output can be stored in a few megabytes – less than the space of a single Spice Girls CD. And there are few writers (apart from JK Rowling) that are worth less to literature than the Spice Girls are to music.

Anyway what this means is that you can carry round your whole ebook library on a single SD card like the one in your digital camera. Thousands and thousands of books will fit on to a 4 Gigabyte SD card, and I make sure that I keep a backup of all my stuff on an SD card in my wallet so that wherever I am, if I happen not to have my ebook reader with me, I can just pop my SD card into one of my mates’ readers and off I go.

The downside of course is that they do the same with my ebook reader, and as often as not when I want my latest literary fix, I have to turf Ned or Sarah off my ebook reader, remove their SD card and plug my own in.

SD cards have plunged in price since I first got one a few years back for my digital camera, and now you can buy them along with the groceries.

But be careful, to some extent you still get what you pay for and saving a pound or two by not buying a named card from somebody like Sandisk could be a false economy. I always use Sandisk SD cards for my ebook readers, and they’ve never let me down yet. Ned on the other hand could tell you horror stories about losing his entire library not once but twice by using SD cards from someone else, and keeping his extra secure backup copy on a card of the same make.

Even a great Sandisk 4Gig SD card will cost a lot less than a tenner, so you’re saving very little, and to me at any rate the peace of mind is worth far more than that.

How about this hard disk storage for all your ebooks?

One of the great things about ebooks is that they take up very little storage space. You can get a dozen or more ebooks in the same space it takes to store a single MP3 music track.

And anybody who’s enough of a reader to look at our site here will know which we prefer here – twelve volumes of great literature, or Colbie Caillat droning on about life’s injustices. No contest, the literature wins every time.

Your Sony reader’s memory will hold several hundred books on its own, and then adding an optional SD card for a few pounds can increase this to thousands. That should be enough for most people, I hear you say. But think again.

Some of us, especially here in the office, like to store our media all together – we’ve a vast library of tens of thousands of ebooks, together with all Michael Jackson’s back catalogue in FLAC, the complete works of JS Bach, and every episode of Rocky ever screened. Together with any other music and videos that take our fancy. And we like to have them all to hand so we can take them with us when we visit our mates, or go away on hols or business trips.

And this is why we love the Verbatim 1 Terabyte USB hard disk drive.

For under £70 – yes £70 – you can get a whopping terabyte of disk storage to plug into your PC, your laptop or your netbook. Yet it’s so small and light at less than a kilo, that you can slip it in your pocket.

Even if you’ve got a huge ebook library like ours, this Verbatim drive is so vast that you can store all your ebooks, your music and still leave room for plenty of films and videos.

This Verbatim hard disk spins at a staggering 7,200 rpm, so it’s fast too.

So there you have it: huge, fast and cheap. What more can you want?

Click the link below to check out this fabulous external USB hard disk drive, and I guarantee you won’t be able to resist it.

A real leather cover for your Sony ebook reader

One of the great things about ebook readers is that they are so small and light.

But the downside of that is that they can be damaged quite easily by careless handling and throwing about.

So most people I know like to protect their ebook readers with a sturdy hard wearing cover, and nothing is more stylish and hard wearing than a genuine leather ebook reader cover.

Now since all ebook readers use the same eink screen, you’d expect them to be the same dimensions – but that would make it far too easy! No I’m afraid that all the major readers have slightly different dimensions, so the leather ebook reader cover than would fit one of them will not fit on a reader of a different make. So you need to be make-specific when choosing your leather ebook cover.

But the good news is that strong, stylish leather covers for them all are widely available.

For the Sony PRS505, our pick is this tough black leather case at only £29.95 including free delivery.

Or if you often use your Sony reader where it’s dark, then try this innovative cover, still genuine leather, with a built in light for only £39.95 with free delivery. I couldn’t decide which one to get for my Sony PRS 505, so I got one of each.

Check out this great small ebook reader light

Well I don’t know about you, but I like to use my Sony PRS505 ebook reader all the time. And I mean all the time.

So I read ebooks on the tube, clutch my ebook reader on the train, in bars, in restaurants – and of course last thing at night, I always spend an hour or two curled up in bed with my trusty Sony PRS505.

Now the great thing about eink in ebook readers is that it’s easy on the eye, and you can read for hours without eye strain. But the downside of this is that you need sufficient ambient light to read your ebook reader by. And sometimes I find I just can’t get in the right position to be comfy and let the bedside light illuminate my Sony PRS505 properly.

And then I stumbled across the answer at my mate’s house. His mum was doing crafts – making birthday cards and the like – and she had this brilliant little light to work by. It was small, light, and bright without being glaring. And it even had a clip on the top so she could either stand it on the table or clip it to her workspace. That’s just the thing for my ebook reader, I thought, and quizzed her about her little light.

Well it turns out it was an ebook reader light! She’d been looking on Amazon for something to make her delicate craft work brighter and come across this great range of cheap ebook reader lights from Mighty Bright. And not to be put off by the name, she’d got one to do her crafts with. They’ve got 2 LEDs that last for ever,  come in blue, silver or black, and for well under £20 are a bargain.

Believe me, I needed no prompting, and using Amazon’s great next day delivery, I was reading my ebook reader in bed

by the light of my very own silver ebook reader light the very next night. It’s incredibly light in weight, bright without glare, and the bendy head means you can set just the right angle to light up your whole eink screen. I clip mine on to the back of my cover and it’s so light it just stays there. And it’s small and light enough to slip in my back pack alongside my Sony PRS505 so it’s always there.

So if you’re tired of reading in the dark, check  out these great ebook reader lights. For around £17, you can’t go wrong.

Latest: Waterstones reduce Sony ebook reader to £199

Check it out – this great Sony 505 ebook reader is now on offer at Waterstones for only £199.

You won’t find better value.

No wonder the Sony PRS 505 is the biggest selling ebook reader in the UK.

kindle announce larger ebook reader

Amazon has announced a larger version of its famous (but not good looking) ebook reader.

It’s only available in the US, like the original Kindle (thank goodness), and Amazon’s aim is to let people read magazines and newspapers on this new large screen ebook reader.

Those of you who have tried an ebook reader such as the Sony PRS505 will know that it’s brilliant to carry about, great for reading novels and other text on, but with its 6 inch screen is not a lot of use for reading larger pages with pictures. But there again it doesn’t take photos either, or walk the dog, but that’s not what I got one for!

The new Kindle DX, expected on sale in the US this summer, has a 9.7 inch eink screen so Amazon hopes to be able to sell subscriptions to major newspapers and periodicals for people to download to their ebook reader.

Now it will certainly be easier to read them on the Kindle DX than on the Sony, but still in our view not as easy as on the paper page which is a lot bigger.  And the killer point for us is that you can fold newspapers and magazines, stick them in your pocket or bag, and they’re easy to carry about and will come to no harm.

The Kindle DX, like its smaller brother, can’t be bent, and is  susceptible to knocks and especially twisting or flexing which will break the glass substrate of the screen and render the device useless. So instead of a periodical you’re carrying about with you an unwieldy fragile Kindle that doesn’t take kindly to being thrown about and won’t fit in your pocket either.

In our view, until they develop flexible, even foldable epaper, don’t even think of getting one of these. Unless you want to spend your life protecting it instead of reading it.

And by the way, it’s still got the ugly Kindle front with the alpha keys on it.

Nul points from us for this!

Ebook readers can help with your allergies

Do you love to read? Do books make you sneeze? Then an Ebook reader could be the answer.

You’d be surprised how many people have asthma, or have allergies to the dust and mites you find in normal paper books.

I’ve a friend who loves to read, but even ten minutes with her head inside a book brings on a sneezing fit. Or at least it did, till she discovered Ebook readers. She doesn’t know if it’s the dust and very fine paper particles  you get with every single paper book, or whether it’s the little mites you often find in paper books. But switching to the Sony Ebook reader stopped the problem dead.

With more and more people these days being diagnosed with allergies, or asthma where even slight irritations can bring on breathlessness, Ebook readers can be a godsend. Your Ebook reader is electronic, the nearest it comes to paper is E-paper, so you’ll be able to read to your heart’s content without fear of a sneezing fit.

If you’ve any friends with asthma or allergies, who love to read, then tell them about www.cheap-ebookreaders.co.uk and let us help them choose the ideal Ebook reader for them.

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