Difference Between Kindle and Sony Reader

Kindle vs Sony Reader

The Kindle from Amazon and The Reader from Sony are two products that are competing for the same market. Since they are used for the same purpose, the comparison can be easily done on its individual parts. The very first thing you would notice is the lack of a keyboard in the Reader, the Kindle has a keyboard incorporated since it is quite essential in searching for books on Amazon.

Although the screens of the two devices look identical, the Reader has an active display while the Kindle has a passive one. The passive display on the Kindle is static and the whole screen needs to be refreshed if a part needs to be modified. An active screen functions like LCD monitors, it can modify screen elements without needing a refresh of the whole screen. This difference means that the Reader can display animations while the Kindle cannot. The reader also has applications that are dedicated to handle music files and images, these are not available with the Kindle. The biggest peeve that people have with the Kindle is the lack of support for PDF files. You would have to convert your PDF files in a computer into a format that Kindle recognizes. The reader has PDF support, making it ideal for people who read a lot of files in PDF format.

In order to get ebooks into your Reader, you would need to install the ebook library software from Sony. This software only runs on Windows and people who do not have Windows are forced to either get it or buy the Kindle instead. The Kindle is tied up to Amazon via their Whispernet infrastructure. This uses a mobile phone company’s infrastructure to connect wirelessly to Amazon’s store. Amazon handles the mobile phone company’s charges and the users only need to pay for the books that they want to buy. This is a big contributing factor to the dominance of the Kindle, since you would not even need a PC to get ebooks.

Summary:
1. Kindle has a full QWERTY keyboard that is not present in the Reader
2. The Kindle has a passive screen while the Sony Reader has an active screen
3. The Reader has a dedicated music player and image viewer which is not available in the Kindle
4. The Reader has PDF support while the Kindle doesn’t
5. The Sony Reader’s ebook library only works with Windows while the Kindle is tied up with Amazon

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