When the Kindle hit the market two years ago people went nuts. The concept of being able to pick numerous ebooks from a bank of over 350,000 titles and store them in a single book looking device that has a paper-esque screen was pretty awesome to book worms. Several manufactures wanted in and Sony came out with a version right away. This started the eReader version 2.0 war.

Both manufactures added in tweaks like larger capacity, easier uploading , bigger libraries of content to choose from and price reductions, but people wanted more. In fact, about a year ago I spoke with Doug Belgrad, Co-President of Columbia Pictures, one night backstage at a Chris Rock show. He told me that he wanted to turn all of his top producers on to the devices to help reduce the 30lb piles of scripts. However, the ability to read a .PDF (the main format for scripts) was not available at the time, so he wasn’t into it. He wasn’t alone in his needs; manufacturers listened and this is no longer the case. Now eReaders are almost perfect, are more user friendly and are gaining speed towards appearing more frequently under Christmas trees this holiday season. The two companies are still neck in neck in terms of popularity and have both been busy adding in all kinds of cool features like the ability to read .PDFs, content upload via Wi-Fi, larger capacity (the Kindle can hold over 3,500 books), longer battery life and quicker refresh rates (a.k.a. page turns).

On eBay you can find eReaders from Kindle, Sony, Hanlin and iRex, although the most popular is the Kindle. In the past 60 days, there were over 23,000 Kindle listings with the average selling price around $113. So definitely check one out for a good read!

Photo credited to: Kindle