Do I want a Cybook Gen 3?

[julesjones]

I'm seriously thinking about buying an ebook reader, a concept which is probably causing various people to fall off their chairs they are laughing so hard. Because I don't do ebooks. Not only do I not do ebooks, there is an entire fanfic zine series which exists in large part because I don't like reading anything more than a couple of screens' worth on a screen, and felt that if I was going to format a good piece of fanfic and print it out, I might as well make it available to others who felt the same way.

Now, it has caused a certain amount of amusement and bemusement over the last couple of years that I, an epublished author with some modicum of success in ebooks, do not read ebooks myself. The trouble is that a particular combination of medical issues means that I find ebooks significantly harder to read than dead tree books. One of those problems is the RSI, which makes pushing a button to turn a page rather more painful than turning a physical paper page. That's before we factor in more page turns for the same word count on any screen that's small and light enough to routinely carry around with me.

Add in how little reading I've been doing the last few years, and dropping the price of half a dozen hardbacks (at a bare minimum) on a fragile piece of electronics I will undoubtedly sit on or drop in the bath seems unappealing even if I didn't have physical discomfort problems with ebooks.

And yet... I like the *concept* of ebooks. I have a couple of Project Gutenberg pieces loaded on my geriatric Palm IIIxe, for "stuck at the bus stop" occasions, and would have more if I could obtain the circular tuit necessary to remember how to use Plucker and load up some more. So I've been thinking on and off about getting something, most likely a Palm TX as that will give me the PDA functions I do make some use of, plus give me a major screen and memory upgrade over my IIIxe, plus add wifi capability. These are probably worth the money for me, especially as it's a genuine tax-deductible business purchase.

Only now a friend has offered me her Cybook Gen 3 for a hundred quid, because it Does Not Play Well with her Mac and she wants to switch to a Sony. I have time to think about this, because she won't want to get rid of it until September, when the new Sony unit ships.

I'm tempted, at that price. I'm *very* tempted. I'll definitely want to play with it for a bit to see if it suits me (I'm concerned about the epaper reverse-polarity flash on page-turn, for starters), but the widget seems to offer a reasonable compromise between big enough screen to be usable and size/weight issues. As far as I know it can also play MP3s, which would be useful. And it has the long battery life that the TX doesn't have (a major reason why I don't already have a TX).

Anyone want to give reasons why I should/shouldn't go for this?

Comments

[autopope.livejournal.com]

At 100 quid it's a bargain. Reads encrypted/DRM'd mobipocket books, too. Has a much bigger/clearer screen than the TX -- this is a big factor. If battery life is your headache, the obvious competitor at that price is a Palm Lifedrive with the CF card hardware hack (battery life tends towards 11 hours) -- but I'd go for the Cybook. Ebook readers grow on you.

Caveat: I use a Sony PRS-505 and love it, I have not used a Cybook (merely seen one in the wild).

And if you play MP3s on it, the battery life will probably go through the floor.

[julesjones]

Thanks, that's very helpful.

Battery life is less of an issue when it's simply being used as an MP3 player on the bus every day. What I'm more concerned about with something also being used as a PDA is that a) I don't have to charge my PDA every day to keep it functioning as an alarm clock, filofax and place to scribble notes, b) a fully charged unit should last for a couple of days away from a power point when it's being used as a way of avoiding carrying half a dozen paperbacks on a long journey. Keeping the IIIxe as the PDA in the handbag and adding the Cybook as a dedicated ebook/MP3 machine that lives in the backpack seems to be a possible compromise.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Datum: on the Journey From Hell (or rather, Edinburgh to San Diego -- arriving a mere 30 hours late) I ploughed through two and a half novels on the PRS-505. About two hours before I arrived, the battery icon dropped from four bars (full) to three.

[julesjones]

That's definitely the sort of device I want, then. I think I'm going to go for this, subject to it being physically comfortable to use when I get my hands on it. (And her not changing her mind. :-)

Hope you've got caught up your sleep a bit. I'm glad you've got a couple of days to recover from all the travel hell before the circus hits town.

[sage99.livejournal.com]

Hi

You don't know me, but it's probably worth saying that screen resolution is as important as size. I have an ancient palm lifedrive that has the same size screen as the TX but twice the pixels and it's a LOT easier to read ebooks (or any text) on it.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Wrong. Both the Lifedrive and the TX have 480x320 HVGA displays -- in fact the units are interchangable.

[sage99.livejournal.com]

Really? Oops -- sorry. I last compared them shortly after I bought mine and the then version of the TX was only 240x320.

If the latest version is improved the it makes decisions about replacing my LD much more feasible -- I read a LOT of ebooks on it.

[julesjones]

Yes, the current version is 480x320, and it's a nice screen, or at least the one I saw was.

I'm currently using a Palm IIIxe, which is a monochrome 160x160, so any modern screen would look better, of course. :-) But I do actually like that screen for most of what I do with it, and I really like having a battery life of a month on my normal usage pattern.

[julesjones]

This is one of the reasons why I don't want to buy *anything* along these lines unless I've had the chance to handle an operating example first. I'd had a couple of people recommend the TX for the particular mix of uses I have, so I wandered along to an electronics store where they have live models on the display shelf, and was impressed with it. Alas, this was a couple of weeks before I moved back to the UK last year, so I didn't buy it then because I didn't want to deal with the hassles of returning it should it die within warranty.

I got a chance to see an epaper device at Eastercon a couple of months ago, and thought it looked like a possibility, but they're expensive. But a second-hand one for 100 pounds looks like an interesting option.

[predatrix.livejournal.com]

Trouble being they're not that easy to offload because they're so niche, but selling it cheap to a mate is a better option than all the hassles of going through e-bay (and wondering if the person on the other end is a Nigerian criminal or afflicted with buyer's remorse).

I don't use it that much because of the struggle to get content onto it (the mobiperl library is supposed to work properly with all systems inc OS X, but have completely failed to have it load, therefore I have had to create books on my old XP box, which is a pain, and never lets me adjust the metadata properly). Somebody like you who actually does use Windows all the time would have better luck...

The screen flash does annoy some people, although quite a few seem to report that it stops bothering them after a while.

Meanwhile the open-systems software for convert-and-load to a Sony Portable Reader seems to actually run on the Mac, and allows me to change metadata and add books to collections.

Also, there are two minor points I will like about the Sony.
1) Sony's device defaults to 'sleep' instead of 'off' to shutting down, therefore you come back to your book instead of the library. I suspect this gives the Sony slightly less battery life than the Cybook, but I'd prefer to use it that way.

2) There's a certain amount more hackery on the Sony, and apparently it can offer a 'clock' -- a feature I got used to in PDA readers, and which is surprisingly useful in all those reading-while-waiting opportunities.