In the last time, E-Book readers are coming up. In the beginning, they were heavy, had bad displays and were really expensive. But by now, the developers managed to create some products really looking worth to buy. Currently, there are two major readers: the Amazon Kindle and the Sony PRS-505.

With Kindle, Amazon wants to overtake the E-Book reader market. It features an 15cm display with 800×600 pixels and has the size of a normal book. The user can download E-Books directly from the Amazon shop using a free mobile connection, so you’ve got basically all available books with you at every time. Up to 200 books should fit into the internal memory which can be extended with an SD memory card.
The battery should last for one week, since it only needs power to turn pages (once the new page is loaded, the display keeps the image without needing any power). In addition, the user can add comments to lines of the E-Book. Price: 280€ (360 US$)

Sony’s PRS-505 has the same display as the Kindle and is, like the Kindle, convenient to read even for long texts. It’s internal memory of 196MB can hold 160 books and can also be extended using a SD memory card or one of Sony’s memory sticks.
The battery should last for 7500 pages, and since the E-Book reader remembers the last read page, you won’t need bookmarks any more. Here, the user can’t add comments because the keyboard is missing.
Furthermore, it can only be equipped with E-Books using a computer or memory card, which makes Kindle far better – you can purchase books everywhere. Price: 235€ (300 US$)
The successor, called PRS-700, will have a touch screen and LED background lighting, thus you can read also in the darkness. This will be a good advantage.

The E-Book readers can display various file formats: Adobe’s E-Book format, EPUB, TXT, RTF and PDF files. They can even display image files (JPG and PNG, but only in grayscales) and play music (MP3 and WAV files).

This video compares the Kindle with Sony’s reader: