To e-read or not to eread ?
Very important : Please look at the coments on the end with many updates
You may not know that I am a avid book reader. Since I was young I was advanced by two yeas in the high school reading books on maths and chemistry of the university . by the time , as student of marketing and economics and the time I was learning English language I was reading American books of marketing advertising and public relations and nearly little later with books on selling which was my favorite reading . Since then upon the times I was adding in reading to some other specialized book areas such as related to radio and electronics , food and nutrition (a subject that I am still interested) computer techniques and programs with some interest in photopaint etc , and till now with some interest in baby caring , by reading magazines and books
With the advent of book searching via the net I have collected some vey interesting books that some of them have already been printed …..
… until IO have bought very recently a e-book reader that is supposed to stop printing !
This e reader have been bought from Plaisio , a chain store of computer systems and peripherals sold under the name turbo x E B600 , which is the brand name of mostly OEM products from supposedly China . This e reader uses the e ink technology a property patent from E ink company using micro bubbles to orientate in a thin film screen
More onfo can be obtained from these sites : http://www.eink.com/technology/howitworks.html and here http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gadgets/high-tech-gadgets/e-ink.htm/printable which is more analytical (the copany making this film )
In this article I will analyze my impressions of this small and tiny reader
This reader is quite small , smaller than A5 paper and quite thin , thinner than my mobile phone using a 6 inch screen
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Its format is very minimal using 4+1 navigation buttons. At the right of this picutre there ar the buttons for font sizing
And hereis a picture with the buttons on the left pane : First button goes for multimendia (smething i am not interested ), lanscape mode , exit mode(frm eradding mode ) and property mode (all adjustments including status bar etc )
The company claims that a power charge can support ca 7000 pages or 30 hours of button operation …
Its inside memory of ca 375MB contains the ebook guide in the main directory and n separate directory ca 60 books in pdf format , which are under the public domain . Several of them are Shakespeare’s Romeo nd Juliet , Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, The art of war and many others and only two Greek e-books .
Navigation is quite simple
- the reader is normally set to being switched always on . This is in contrast to most electronic appliances m because once a page is applied , no electricity required to keep the bubbles in their position ! In its off condition there is still a picture on the screen
- A memory slot is also available using SD cards with memories up to 4 GB, The company Plaisio suggests to insert the SD card with the power off …
- These are the file formats that the reader supports : pdf , epub, html ,chm ,txt , rtf ,prc and image files as bmp lpg and gif
-Directory listing is of 3 modes , the basic can show only the titles , the second shows the page name and a thumbnail of the file and the third does it on two columns
This is the analytical mode
THis is the landscape file mode
-Directory listing also supports direct access to the flash memory and files are shown mixed with a descriptive mark on the screen. ON the above picture is this shown on the exterme right of the dir listing There is ability to sort files by title , by author
-Opening a file is quite simple by just pressing the [enter ] in a file . In just 1-3 seconds most files have been loaded, depending on the file size . chm files however require much more time , a 3.5 MB file requires about 40 secs!
Once a file is opened , there is the ability to change the font size with the buttons located in the right part of the reader . The correct page layout can be seen using the font off or size ‘1’ .
The 2nd button from the left can turn the view into landscape . This happens also in the dir listing.
Navigation is made with the 4 buttons . Left and right up and down work correctly for the directory listings but in reading mode left/up and right/down arrows do same work . Could expect a better solution
Now , testing the reader I have found several interesting and peculiar things a follows:
First e ink is not 100% white . See this picture :
It seems eink is 60% gray leveled comapring to the pure white
-Resizing fonts (numbers 2-7 )in pdfs with layouts , destroys the format in full separating the pictures at the ‘end’ of the virtual page . Landscaping retains the format in the font off option (1) but splits the page into two parts upper and lower. Pages with very small upper and lower margins suffer from truncation ….(and that’s still debating in several cases )
For example this page
wit font resizing pctures beasme this way . I think that Adibe erader which is built in did this fault
In most cases the fonts this way are still quite small , at least 4-5 pixels . Possibly better results could be made if the screen could be 9 or more inches But since these big models require more than …..€600 you can say this is sufficient . Sometimes a…. magnifying glass can help a lot!!!
-Pdfs with scanned pictures result in just page resize . Lanscape orientation can show normally the upper and the lower half into page parts
-Landscape pdfs are correctly shown in the landscape mode
-IN a very condensed , small font , 3 column file , resizing it causes more small-ling of the characters size !!
- Table layout once font is increased from off , is destroyed and text is shown as it was a copy paste from a html file into wordpad
- Most photos can be shown correctly !
- Since the purchase I have used for ca 6 hours with continous play . The battery was on the half charge as shown in the screen but in this time the battery was drained off though on screen it shown a ¼ charge ratio.I then charged for cxa 1,5 hr time and shown a full battery but with just 3 minutes of button play the battery level was back to the middle!!!
And on the end this is the question : to e read or not to e-read ? As for the moment I am with mixed impressions . Have seen some more moels on another chain store with somehow very small price differences and on other models (Cool reader , be book )
