I have had a quiet time recently. Instead of devouring books like there’s no tomorrow my wife has had her nose stuck in her new ebook reader and now she wants to give a review of it.
Review: Ectaco JetBook Lite
I had wanted an ebook reader for ages and between waiting for the perfect design to come along and not wanting to get sucked into anything proprietary, I finally settled on the Ectaco JetBook Lite. I say settled because it didn’t fulfill all my nitpicky design desires, but as I got it on sale for CAD$129 I figured it would do until something I liked better came along. However, after about three weeks of use, I could not be happier with it.
At about five by seven inches wide it is perfect for holding in my hand, not too heavy or too light. In fact, as this version runs on four AA batteries, the battery pack makes the whole thing nicely balanced to be held easily in the left hand, and the slide bar allows for one handed page turning, in both directions (there is also a button on the bottom for turning pages). The screen is LCD but is very easy to read for hours at a stretch. The slow page turns and ‘flash’ when you turn the page that you get with e-ink are not a problem here. There’s no wi-fi on this thing, so you have to load your books off your computer. And it doesn’t play MP3s, but who cares. That’s why you have an iPod. If I had to make any criticism at all, I wish it came some sort of cover to protect the screen so I could shove it into my purse. Or one of those rubber scuba suit things that people put on their iPhones.
While actual reading experience is, to me, far more important than getting the book onto the device, transferring files to and from is painless. The JetBook Lite comes preloaded with a ton of freebies, the cream of Project Gutenberg. Some of these I had already read (or in the case of the Sherlock Holmes, memorized) and others were not in my immediate must-read pile (CIA World Book?!). Since the computer recognises the JetBook Lite as just a USB drive, I was easily able to copy everything off, and replace it with books of my choice. As long as you keep the top folders, Books & Pictures, you can arrange the sub-folders anyway you want.
The JetBook Lite works with all sorts of file formats. I have tried txt, mobi, rtf & epub and they all work fine. I have had less luck with PDFs, but I admit haven’t spent the time to properly fiddle with them either. As I am still working my way through classics & freebies, I have not actually had to purchase a book yet, but since they seem to come as epub, hopefully I should be okay.
The JetBook Lite is perfect for anyone who wants to dip their toe in the ebook water. I was planning on keeping this until something better came along, but really, I can’t imagine what feature would get me to switch.