I had some general thoughts on ereaders last time, but since I’ve been looking at the new Nook Touch, I’ve been nitpicking much more at my current ereaders.
As previously noted, I don’t think I would have shelled out the nearly $400 for the Alex Spring Design ereader, but free things are always good! That said, I’m still thinking about selling it and getting a Nook Touch for several reasons.
The LCD screen running Android was a nice touch prior to the enabling touch for eink devices, but now that you can use an eink interface with touch, I think the battery drain of the LCD screen and the overall weight it adds to the device isn’t worth it. I could browse the internet with my Alex, but since I use it primarily for reading books and since I have an iPhone, I didn’t particularly feel the need to do so. Instead, I kept the wireless turned off most of the time to save on battery.
My main issue with the Alex is that it’s a niche product. No matter what people think of them, the Nook and Kindle are currently ereader market leaders, with Sony and Kobo trailing behind. Sadly, the Alex is pretty much nonexistent. Since I use Calibre to manage all my ebooks, the lack of Alex users is particularly frustrating, since the Calibre designers don’t really take the Alex into account.
I don’t blame them, of course, but it is annoying for me as a user.
Because of this, I’ve felt as though my ability to manage my ebook library is particularly limited. Basic syncing and metadata editing work fine, but while Alex supports different categories for books, it only allows you to edit those categories via the ereader.
In other words, if I want to categorize my 300+ ebooks, I have to go through them one by one to do so. I had started doing that, only to discover that whenever I synced the Alex with Calibre, all the category data got erased. Argh!! This probably wouldn’t be an issue with a smaller collection, but since I’m sure my ebook collection is only going to get larger, the inability to categorize my books is going to make browsing more and more unwieldy as time goes by.
Which brings me to another thing… I have no idea why, but Alex gives you the choice of organizing books via author or by title. All well and good, except it organizes authors alphabetically via first name. Possibly this has to do with my using Calibre instead of the Alex ereader software, but it’s pretty frustrating.
In conclusion, the Alex is a nice device, but I think I’ll be eyeing the Nook Touch for a while. Its smaller size, faster page turns, and lighter weight make it a much more attractive deal.
K. Joyce Tsai | Comments