Dear Author: Romance Book Reviews, Author Interviews, and Commentary

This past week, Sony sent an email letting everyone know that its e ink reader is ready to ship. It’s now backordered, but it was ready to ship. E ink devices work kind of like sophisticated magna doodle boards. (In an unrelated riff, I had a MDB on my dorm room door in college. It worked great as a display piece for wandering artists and semi witty individuals but not so great as a message board). Under the screen there are spheres with negatively charged black plastic on one side and positively charged white plastic on the other. The power (voltage) applied determines which color appears face up giving a pixel a white or black appearance.

The e ink technology cannot work with a backlight. It actually works to reflect light like ordinary paper. The benefits to this type of technology are as follows:

No backlight removes the eyestrain caused by backlit technologies.
Long battery life. The image can remain static without a constant supply of power extending the device’s battery charge for a long time. Sony claims 7500 page …

I had a mini debate/discussion with the readers over at MobileRead about whether backlights were important. I thought that they were and wouldn’t buy a reader without one. Most everyone over there thought that backlights were really secondary to the better display of an e-ink device. What say you?

{democracy:3}

If you don’t have an ereader with a backlight, you’ll have to get a booklight. Here are some booklights that I have used in the past:

Zelco bitty booklightI bought at Barnes and Noble because a) BN would have the best booklight available, right? And this one is packaged just for readers. It also had a battery pack and an AC adapter. I thought I would really appreciate the convenience of the battery pack while traveling and the AC adapter at home. Yet, the AC adapter cord was short and I often found myself fumbling around for an outlet near the bed. (hotels weren’t always so tech friendly). The battery pack convenient but it relied on 4 C! batteries which turned the itty bitty book light into a behemoth …