The study was conducted to answer the following questions.
How compatible are the current e-resources which are originally meant to be used on a computer with this new technology?
Do license agreement even allow the transfer of e-books to these devices?
If customers asked which of the e-readers worked best with the library resources would one know how to reply?
Would the customers want to use these devices for study, work or for pure entertainment?
Five distinctive e-book readers were selected for the study and two copies of each were purchased to the library. The main basis for the devices were their availability and reasonable pricing; consumer products in the 200-300 Euro range were chosen. Devices designed for professional use were not selected. The five evaluated devices were Foxit eSlick, Bookeen CyBook Opus, BeBook, Amazon Kindle, and Sony Reader Touch Edition PRS-600.
All of the devices use the same E Ink Vizplex technology. They also all can hold over a thousand books, so the memory capacity was not an issue, especially when they all also had slots for memory cards.