TreeHugger Picks: Electronic Reading with E-Books and Readers

As Mike mentioned earlier today, in the green smackdown between reading online vs. reading dead tree publications, the answer is: it depends, on a lot of things. Fair enough, but when it comes to bringing books and the like into the electronic world, what are some of our options?

	1) Amazon's Kindle is trying to do for e-books what the iPod/iTunes combo did for digital music; some publishing executives think Amazon’s entrance into the e-book world as a major test for the long-held notion that books and newspapers may one day be consumed on a digital device. You don't have to wait to read TreeHugger on Kindle, though.
	2) Before their was Kindle, there was the Sony Reader, an interesting device in its own right. It uses no power to hold its image so only changing pages consumes any juice; it is apparently very clear and easy to read, and you can adjust the font size to suit your aging eyes.about which David Pogue, of the New York Times, says,"The Sony Reader is an impressive achievement, and an important step toward a convenient alternative to bound books.
	3) TreeHugger Lloyd is a big fan of the New York Times slick online reader; he says it "is so good that I might just dispense with the Dead Tree Version. It looks good, is completely intuitive, updates itself and completely changes the experience of reading news on a computer. It may also be the first thing that Microsoft has done in years that is cooler than Apple." The remaining two picks are after the jump...

4) Palm's Foleo was pretty universally panned by our gadget-loving brethren at Gizmodo and Engadget, but we liked it as an online reader; anyone who is interested in green computing is trying to get as much as they can out of as little as possible, the least power consumed, the least hardware on their desk, the most flexibility from their components, and Foleo delivers.

5) The paperless movement is helping user in an age of e-readers, as families are going paperless far faster than businesses; they have to pay the price of ink jet cartridges. “Paper is no longer the master copy; the digital version is,” says Brewster Kahle, the founder and director of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library. “Paper has been dealt a complete deathblow. When was the last time you saw a telephone book?”