Espositori

If you read as fast and much as I do, you run out of storage space for your books sonner or later. So I have been watching the news about eBook Readers very closely during the last years. And guess what? Not much happening in Germany. Nothing. Nada. Rien. There are articles from time to time about new devices and at the end of them you always have to read that the product will NOT be released in Germany for several reasons. Mainly because books have a price fixing, so ebooks could not be cheaper than paperbacks.

Finally I decided that I do not want to wait another 10 years but to buy from somwhere else!

But which one? The most famous is propably the Amazon Kindle. It is available in three versions/generations and it would make sense, when you used to buy most of your books from Amazon anywhay, won't it? But wait, after having a look at the 'Kindle Terms of Use', you feel like biting you toe off. They handle a properitary format (AZW), you can only buy from Amazon and some subcontracters and you are not allowed to transfer the books to another device or other users. WTF? That means I have to stick with the Kindle for the rest of my life or buy all books again if I want to switch to Sony? And you can not even store and read a manual or user guide as PDF there? I don't thing so Amazon!

Then there are a few Sony readers available (Sony just knows how to make good looking stuff and I fall for nice designs).That's more like it, the PRS-700 (Sony's creativity stops when it comes to device names) supports PDF and ePub. It has it's own proprietary format called BroadBand eBook (BBeB). But again, a look at the digital rights management makes you want to swollow your tongue. Nope!

And then I found it: the eSlick from Foxit! Nice basic design, just PDF and TXT and no adhesion contract included. I contacted the sales people, they answered within a few hours, very friendly and polite. After ordering, it took about 5 days for the reader to arrive, very fast.

It is very light, only 180 grams and the surface feels very nice, soft and slip-proof. It comes with a USB cable that you use for datatransfer as well as to plug it in the power switch (German adapter was included). The e-Ink works like a charm, the fonts are crisp clear. The 6" display hardly glares, so you can use it outside in the sunshine as well. It comes with a 2GB SD-card, that I replaced with a 4GB micro-SD-card, which it took without any problems. My openSuse did not know what to do when I connected the reader with the USB cable, so I am using the cardreader. Foxit claims that it should work with Linux, so I try again when I have more time.

It takes 18 seconds to boot up and about 3 seconds to open a book with 120 pages. Flipping pages is as fast as you can read, hardly any delay. On the left side of the device are four buttons: Music (did I mention that it comes with earphones and can play MP3?), Trash, Back and Menu. You can also reach the quick menu using the front middle button. Here you can select very easy: Go To Page, Landscape, Bookmark and Reflow. On the left side are two buttons for resizing the fonts. You can display them very, very large, so it is suitable for people with bad eyesight. Once you selected Reflow it adjusts the text automatically after you changed the text size. It keeps track of the last five books that you read, so you can just jump to the actual book and page, where you stopped reading last time with the Continue Reading function.

The Menu also offers the Memory status of the device (462M) and the SD-card. You can set the Sleep Mode to 5 / 10 / 30 or 60 minutes. The actual Version is 1.0, Build 0713 (now1.0 Build 0818, Build 2 should come soon). Updating the Firmware is easy and works in three steps, you need a Windows Operating System for it though. The average size of a book depends on the PDF creator that was used and naturally on the amount of pages but I would say, it is between 300 KB and 1 MB, so it will take a few years to fill my 4 GB card! The batterie lasts quite a bit if you constantly read, I suppose it needs the most energy for shutting down, booting up and loading the files. Reloading via USB and power cable is very fast.

I can just say that I am more than satisfied with my eSlick. I read about three books on it by now and just love it! Oh, did I mention the price? It came to 229 euros, including shipping and the jacket. Additional information can be found here: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/ebook/