An e-reader is a portable electronic device designed primarily for reading digital books and written material, featuring a low-glare screen that reduces eye strain compared to standard tablet or phone displays.
E-Readers
Another electronic device that we use nowadays is called an e-reader. They tend to be a little bit smaller than a tablet but larger than a phone, and it's really designed for reading. It has less power than a tablet or a phone does, it has a lot fewer apps that you can put on it, but it's designed primarily for reading.
Because of that, it has this special screen on it. Tablets, phones, laptops and desktops all tend to have screens that are very vibrant, with lots of colors, and very bright, and the problem with that is sometimes it can be difficult to read, especially late at night when you're trying to go to bed — these things will wake you up. Versus something like an e-reader, because of its special screen, is much more pleasant to read books on.
So what's the definition of an e-reader? Well, it's electronic versions of written material, and it can be displayed on these devices. Vendors would be, as an example, Amazon has their Kindle, or there's the Books Tablet Note Air.
The purpose of it really is just primarily for reading, just a comfort level with reading these materials, so you don't have to have an actual printed book.
The OS on these tends to be very specific, because it doesn't have a lot of features, it doesn't have a lot of apps, so we tend to have more of a type of firmware rather than an OS on these. And then mainly the apps — although there might be some different apps on some of them — mainly it's reading apps. Now, some of them really kind of push towards more of a tablet, so they might have a few more options there.
The benefits are that it's a portable reader and there's less eye strain with it. The drawbacks are that there can be some limited capabilities with them, because they're just built for reading. They don't have a lot of the bells and whistles that a tablet would have.
An up close look at this: you can see that it has just a softer kind of feel to the picture that's on there. And then when we open up, we can scroll through the different books and see that there's different books that we can read on here. There is a menu item on here that, if I click on it, shows an option for web browsing, so it does have a little more capabilities than just reading. We could go to a website, and then it wants me to connect to one of my Wi-Fi. But essentially what we can do is we can do a little bit of web browsing and a few other things on this device.
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