When eBook Readers first arrived, their $300 and $400 price tags created quite a stir. If you’re not one to spend hundreds of dollars on books each year, why would you spend that much on a device to read them? Now we have a new category – Budget eReaders. Priced between $150 and $200, these more affordable devices focus just on the basics of reading. No bells, no whistles.

The Sony Reader Pocket and Kobo eReader 

Reading On A Budget

To bring the price down these devices lack the more advanced features found in the Amazon Kindle or Sony Reader Touch. These include the ability to play music and audiobooks, to display personal photographs, touchscreen controls, internet connections, built-in dictionaries and note-taking features.

They’re also missing the AC Adaptors included with more expensive models. Instead of charging your eBook Reader through a wall outlet, you’ll need to connect it to a personal computer using USB. AC Adaptors are sold separately for approximately $40.

Sold separately, AC Adaptors and wall chargers 

Budget eBook Reader Showdown

There are only two choices available in Canada today. The Sony Reader Pocket, currently available for $200, and the Kobo eReader, launching in early May for $150. As I have done for the more expensive models, here’s a comparison between the two.

Design

The Kobo eReader is designed to try to match the same experience of the more expensive models. It has a large 6” screen and the same flat, white, case design as the Kindle, but uses a great deal of plastic and rubber in its construction. It’s the lighter of the two, but will require more care.

Sony’s approach with the Pocket is to offer a more compact model, hence the smaller 5” screen. It is significantly smaller than any other reader on the market and so is easier to slip into a purse or carry bag and its metallic frame will allow it to take more abuse during travels.

Both devices use the exact same E-Ink display technology found in all eBook Readers, regardless of price. Unfortunately for Sony the trend today is towards larger screens, think of the Apple iPad and Kindle DX, and for that reason the Kobo has the edge with the larger display.

Reading

Both devices are limited in content to books, magazines, newspapers, and personal documents. Both reproduce their books as they look in print, complete with titles and illustrations, and both will remember your page after you shut it down.

With the Sony Pocket you can also create additional bookmarks to remember favourite passages and a set of number buttons allow you to flip to a specific page, not just the next chapter. It also has the option to rotate the page on the screen, from portrait to landscape mode. These are all features missing on the Kobo.

Landscape display mode 

When it comes to loading books and turning pages, the Sony Pocket is significantly faster. Both use a directional control pad under the screen to turn pages, but Sony’s is better engineered and placed in the middle to accommodate both left-handed and right-handed users. The Kobo’s control pad is a blue, injection-molded blob on the far right for right-handed users only.

While the Kobo has six different choices in font sizes and the Sony Pocket just three, their largest font sizes work out to be exactly the same, offering the same support for those with poor or failing eyesight.

The Kobo eReader and Sony Reader Pocket at largest font size 

Content Organization

One of the advantages of an eBook Reader is that it can hold hundreds if not thousands of titles and so as you begin to amass such a large collection, how your eBook Reader keeps that content organized becomes very important.

Both devices use a virtual bookshelf system. Your books are displayed as if collected in a column, but by using the actual illustrated covers, the Kobo achieves a kind of elegance. Unfortunately it can only list your titles either in the order you’re reading them or alphabetically.

The Sony Pocket takes the advantage here by allowing you to sort through books by date, by author, and by collections that you can name and create yourself. This makes it easier to divide the books you use for school or work from the ones you read for pleasure.

Storage Capacity And Formats

With 1GB of internal memory the Kobo can hold approximately 1,000 books and then, through a built-in SD memory card slot (memory cards sold separately), users can add up to 4GB more for an additional 4,000 books. This is dramatically more than the Sony Pocket which has room for approximately 350 titles and that’s it.

That’s quite a difference, but consider that both devices are very limited in the kind of content they can use and it may not be as important a factor as it might first seem.

The Kobo can only accept two types of files; ePUB for books and PDF for documents. The Sony Pocket can accept these as well as Microsoft Word, RTF, and Text files. Generally these types of files are not very large.

With the more expensive eBook Readers, which can also play MP3s, audiobooks, and digital photographs, having Gigabytes of storage has a clear use, but with budget eBook Readers where it’s mainly text and a few illustrations, it’s unlikely you’ll need it. If you do it’ll be with Adobe PDF documents which can vary dramatically in format, size, and content.

Both devices display PDF files as they originally appear, without any loss in graphics or organization of text, and both can display them in both portrait and landscape modes, but while the Kobo simply magnifies the page to make it easier to see, forcing you to use directional controls to pan across the page to read it, the Sony Pocket can actually change the size of the font itself through three different sizes. This makes the content easier to read and keeps it on pages that you can flip through. With the Sony Pocket you can also bookmark pages for reference.

While the Kobo has the edge in holding more books, until it can do more with that extra memory it’s not a very big advantage.

eBook Stores

Both the Kobo and Sony eBook Stores work the same way. You have to purchase and download the books to your home computer first (Mac or PC). Once downloaded, you need to use free software to then unlock and transfer the files over to your eBook Reader.

Both eBook Stores offer a wide selection of books including those from Canadian and independent publishers. They have both English and French selections as well as a section of free classics. Both stores offer newspapers and magazines from North American markets, both for single issue purchases as well as by subscription.

Here in Canada, the Kobo book store is part of Chapters.Indigo.ca 

Part of Chapters.Indigo.ca, the Kobo eBook Store

The Sony eBook Store goes a little farther by offering free previews of books for download plus it integrates free titles from Google Books and offers up a Library Finder so you can locate a public library in your area from which to borrow eBooks from.

Both companies use the ePUB book format and so their stores and their devices are interchangeable. You can use the Sony Pocket with the Kobo store and the Kobo eReader with the Sony Store. Apple’s upcoming iBooks store, not yet available in Canada, also uses ePUB as well as independent publishers and public libraries. The only eBook Store not compatible is Amazon’s which offers books only for their Kindle alone.

Sony eBook Store 

Software

To manage your purchased books, both devices require you to use your personal computer.

The Kobo eReader uses two programs. Adobe Digital Editions is needed to unlock the books and the Kobo desktop software is needed to transfer them to the eReader device. Both will compete to try to manage your book collection for you and both can be used to read your books on your computer monitor. The Kobo software is quite crude, it displays your book collection and lets you read one of the titles and that’s it.

The Sony Pocket uses just the one program, Reader Library, and it’s quite sophisticated. It will manage all of the content on your Sony Pocket, including documents and PDF files, and includes a feature to keep track of books borrowed from public libraries, allowing you to check them in and out online.

Extras

The Kobo eReader includes one hundred free classics such as The Count of Monte Cristo, The Art of War, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland. This may seem like a great deal, except all eBook Stores offer a selection of free classics. Sony’s eBook Store, which includes those from Google Books, has the largest. What Kobo has done is merely save you the step of downloading them or, arguably, have added the step of deleting the ones you don’t want.

The Kobo eReader is the only one with an option for buying books while you travel. Those with an iPhone or BlackBerry can use the Kobo mobile app and a Wi-Fi or 3G cellular internet connection to purchase and download books from the online store while you’re on-the-go. You can then transfer your purchases to your eReader using Bluetooth wireless. It’s not a major feature, but it is a nice one to have. UPDATE - At launch in early May this feature will only support BlackBerry devices, but will be expanded to include Adroid, iPad, iPhones functionality and features too. 

The Winner – The Kobo eReader

We have two excellent eBook Readers that deliver where it counts. They both support ePUB stores, PDF documents, Macs, PCs, and English and French languages. Both offer large print and both have access to free books. In the end it comes down to the Kobo eReader and its larger screen at a lower price. The bigger display and the elegant use of book covers simply translates into a nicer reading experience.

Check out my other showdown for premium eBook Readers where I compare the Sony Reader Touch Vs. The Amazon Kindle 2nd Generation 

You'll find my full review of the Kobo eReader here and my full review of the Kindle 2nd Generation and the Kindle DX.