Kindle vs. Nook vs. Iphone vs. Ipad vs. everything else...

Ereader reviews from a publisher/writer. I just wanted to make some quick comments for those who have been contemplating buying an E-reader, or maybe for those ever thinking about writing a book online.

I wanted to state that, although Kindle has a definite lead in number of books available, devices, etc., don't count out Barnes and Noble, Apple, and Google. From a writing standpoint, let me just say that writing for Amazon may "seem" easy, until you turn around and re-download your book and see what it looks like on a variety of their devices.

Their document converter, basically, sucks, and isn't consistent with its formatting conversion to the point where things look the same from device to device. It really does poorly when it comes to the Kindle Fire, since the resolutions are SO different (Better) on that thing compared to its other Kindle devices, and Amazon's converter technology to convert documents just hasn't caught up with it yet, so books will often be displayed a bit wonky on there.

So if you ever get a book and some text is cut off here and there, as much as you would like to blame formatting on the writer, a lot of times it's that Amazon's document converter isn't correctly translating text from one device type to another.

I'm sure they'll get the bugs worked out eventually but, for now, it's just so new that the technology isn't really perfected yet in my opinion.

Now, I've never played on an Apple device, but I have seen my books previewed on an IPhone and an Ipad and they're top notch. I've also seen an Android phone view a book from Google play, as well as having seen their previewer, and have seen the previewer for Nook books and, let me just say that they more consistently display things correctly than Amazon could even hope of doing.

Although publishing through Google is a BIG pain in the butt and requires multiple steps, as does Apple, when they pull out the finished product from your document file, it looks very professional. As does a Nook book. However, Amazon is kind of lacking in the whole quality control department. We don't even know anything is wrong with a book as far as formatting is concerned unless we download it ourselves. That, to me, just isn't a good business practice. So if Amazon wants to continue taking the lead, they need to do better.