Ebook Reader, Ectaco Jetbook

[Ghosth]

Well a few of you have heard me talking about the new toy I was getting.
Well Malap reminded me that perhaps I should put up a review for anyone else thinking of getting one.
Well it arrived yesterday, so after some 4 hours of reading time, here are my first impressions.

First off here is a fairly helpfull review.

http://www.geardiary.com/2009/03/09/the-ectaco-jetbook-universal-portable-reading-device-review/

Mine came in the exact same box, looks just like that, except its black instead of red.
It came withA Bonus CD with more dictionary's, flashcards, and phrasebooks than you can shake a stick at.
A USB cable, standard USB to PC on one end, mini USB connects to the Jetbook on the other.  Shows up in windows as a mass storage device (flashdrive, thumbdrive). This cable can also be used to charge the battery if needed.
A battery charger 110vac to mini usb port
A pair of earphone buds. (doubles as a mp3 player,  it will actually play mp3's while reading)
A nice black case for protecting your new toy. One side has a stiff shield in it, to protect the screen.

What I liked
Battery was fully charged, ready to go.
Battery lasts me about 5 days depending on how much I read.
Its small, drops into a shirt pocket, with about an inch showing.
Light weight, no hand strain holding it at all.
Text is very crisp
Boots up fast
page turns are almost instantaneous, with no flash
Has a built in file manager, lets you organize, delete, etc
2 different page turning buttons, plus has a configurable automatic page turner as well.
Supports many different formats (Recently added Mobi, PRC, Epub, and rtf) as a firmware update.
has choice of fonts, and sizes from 12 to 32.
Has an auto shutoff, with a variety of settings.
Is simple, easy to navigate.



What I disliked
Battery not replaceable by me, sealed into the case. So if it ever needs replacing its send it back or buy a new one.
Its small (yes thats a double sided coin)
does not support .htm format

After a couple of hours of reading, experimenting with different formats. I turned it off, dropped a 512 mb sd card I have for an older camera into it, plugged it back into the PC via the usb port. Much to my surprise it opened 2 folders, one for internal memory, and one for the sd card.

I've had this for a month now, and over all I much prefer either the .rtf or .doc formats.

But overall at this point I am a very very happy camper.

Retails for 300$ however Newegg had them on sale for 199$ with free shipping.

As far as the competition is concerned, I did not look at the Rex Iliad, out of my price range.

Kindle, and Sony I looked the most closely at. Both are designed to make you buy your content from the seller. In the Kindles case that is Amazon.com. The good news is that with a built in wireless connection that happens pretty quick. The bad news is you pay for every book you read. Also they are not designed to be easy to load books onto from your PC.

The Jet book on the other hand, doesn't have the wireless connectivity built in. But you don't have to buy your books either. In fact it comes with a card listing 3 very good web pages where you can download books for free.

The Kindle, while considerably bigger overall, only has a slightly bigger screen.
http://freshtech.wordpress.com/2009/05/13/kindle-2-vs-ectaco-jetbook/

http://www.feedbooks.com/

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

www.manybooks.net
I highly recomend manybooks.net, free, you can download the book in any format you choose, and can set font, text size.

For Sci-Fi and Fantasy
http://www.baen.com/library/
The Baen free library is top notch.
This was the site that set my feet on this path.

Searching here for my favorite Author (Mercedes Lackey) I ended up searching the net for a couple more books that I had been unable to find. Much to my suprise, there are books out there to be downloaded as torrent files in whole library's. Individual authors can take a bit more legwork. And you may have to find a converter to get it into a format you can handle. For example I found my Mercedes Lackey source, but the vast majority were in *.lit format. Which is I believe Microsoft Ebook specific format. However a bit of research soon found me a free converter.  I use the ABC Amber Lit Converter which lets me convert those files into my choice of PDF, html, hlp, rtf, chm, txt, doc, wpd, rb, pdb, fb2 formats.

Most of you know that I'm also a pirate. Grin
I am currently in the process of downloading a 23 Gigabyte library.
Under general fiction I have 2,194 books by over 100 authors.
Under Sci-fi Fantasy I have 4077 books arranged by author, and another 1500 that I have not yet sorted, removed duplicates, etc.

The Average .txt ebook seems to run less that 1,000kb, so you can pack quite a few onto a reader like the Jetbook.
Or an entire library onto a 4 gig DVD. 
I have not yet started on WWII titles. I already have enough reading material to last me for many many years.

Conclusion, once I compared price, features, file types supported, and source of books there was only one decision for me.
The Jetbook won hands down. You might choose differently. But if your a reader, and tired of holding big heavy books, or paying for your reading material. You might want to give this a look. I typically spent 200$ a year on book clubs, trips to Barnes and Noble, and picked up a lot of books at the second hand store.  Or, you can buy a jetbook for 200$ and have whole library's of free books at your fingertips.  Partly it will depend on what you read.

Sorry this got so long, I guess I had a lot to say. And yes I'm more than a little excited.
I had read every book worth reading (in my opinion) in our high school by the 10th grade. 15 years ago I said the same for the Fargo and Moorhead public library's.  Well now I'm reading my way through the Internet library's, and I don't see myself coming to an end anytime soon. In fact, I think I have enough "good stuff" to last me a couple of lifetimes.

I've had my Jetbook for a month now, and figuring conservatively, that if I put a dollar in a can for each book I read on it. That in 2 or 3 months it would be "paid off", well I think after a month of use that its already paid for itself. I can't see how I ever managed without it. And I highly recommend it for anyone who loves to read and is a bit internet savvy.

Anyway, if your interested, have questions,  or are curious, drop me a line at
ghosth@mcleodusa.net

[APDrone]

Ghosth..

Thanks for putting this up. I've spent quite a bit of time, today,  scratching my head over the options that are out there.

Now that another 4 months have passed, any further observations?

I'm looking at getting something for my wife, but she tends to read current releases and watches for new stuff from authors. If you buy the kindle versions, can they be converted to run on the Jetbook?

Thanks again,

[Halo]

Thanks. Very helpful. Been considering electronic books from time to time but so far haven't made the leap.

[Ghosth]

Well we just picked up a second Ebook reader for my wife.  Yes we are a 2 Jetbook family.
She was getting pretty jealous of mine.

Best advice I can give you, read and research all you can before you make a decision.

http://www.mobileread.com
This board is just for people who read Ebook's on all kinds of devices.
You'll see all kinds of opinions about all kinds of products.

As far as I know the kindle stuff is actually stored on their server.
You just have access to it. The Sony is I believe stored on the reader, but Sony can delete a book at any time.
Part of what you paying for is wireless access to the Sony store. However I think the Sony readers are a bit more flexible than the Kindle. In that you can load books from other sites, friends, etc. But you'll want to check into that yourself.  I haven't had one so I can't swear to what they can/can't do.



Also Jetbook just came out with a new version, 150$ minus the mp3 player and it runs on 4 aa battery's.
But otherwise it has all of my Jetbook's features. I'm hearing 23 hours of use on a set of battery's. (if it was me I'd be looking at 2 sets of rechargeable battery's and a charger)

Partly depends on if you wife is happy "just" getting books from Amazon.
If you are more interested in finding public domain books. (Loads of websites with free books out there for download)
(Here is just one of many http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/

Or if you want a blend of both.

For me, yes, Jetbook is the only way I'll fly. I can't afford to buy books from amazon for the kindle.
Nor from the Sony store for that matter.
However I'm a pretty good Pirate, and I have loads of time to search.
So my personal library of Ebooks is already over 10 gig's and over 20,000 titles.  (And growing)
Most of that is Sci-fi, fantasy, or fiction of one sort or another.  Although I am starting to branch out and reach farther afield.

What sold me about my Jetbook then, and still does today was that it can read the widest variety of file types. And has longer battery life than most other readers.

You will find a lot of books out there in the *.lit format (Microsoft Reader)
Jetbook won't read them directly, but amber lit convert (free, google it) will convert to any one of several file times which Jetbook can read.

Also *.pdf files are mostly not formatted for reading on a ebook reader. So each page you have to scroll down, then back up again. (pain in the posterior) So I use Zilla PDF converter to convert them to a plain text file.
No more scrolling.
However, you'll lose the formatting, and probably the pictures. So it depends on exactly what it is.

My wife paid $$$ for the latest Dan Brown Hardcover book the Lost Symbol.
After she read it I tried to read it. After 14 chapters I gave up, came into my computer, spent half an hour. Found it, downloaded it, converted it from pdf to txt, loaded it on my book, and I'm reading it there instead of in paper.

I'll never go back to paper. Save a forest, buy an Ebook reader.

If this doesn't answer all your questions feel free to PM me. (Sorry this got so long, I still get VERY excited talking about my Jetbook. Yes, I still love it that much after almost 6 months)

[eagl]

You don't have to get books from Amazon for the kindle...  Half of my kindle books are from project gutenberg, and there are many other sources of free books that the kindle will view just fine.  If you're lazy you can email the book to your kindle account and for 10 cents, amazon will send it to your kindle automatically.  That's a really neat feature especially if you're in a hurry.  Otherwise you just hook the kindle up to the PC with the usb cable and copy it to the right folder.

The only thing I don't like about my kindle2 is the lack of .pdf support.  The new kindle DX supports .pdf files, but it's a lot bigger since it's aimed at periodical subscriptions like newspapers and magazines.

Would I re-purchase my kindle if I had to do it all over again?  Probably.  The price has dropped a lot since I bought mine, so it's a better deal now than it was.  The other consideration of course is that not only do other devices show .pdf files natively, the smaller netbooks are about the same height and width of a kindle, and only about 4x as thick as a kindle in a carry-case, so a small netbook may make for a better choice if the extra weight isn't a factor (like if you carry a backpack or messenger bag already).

I had to respond about the mis-information about kindle book sources though...  Amazon will automatically convert any files you send them to beam wirelessly (for the same 10 cent charge of course), or you can get one of any number of free conversion programs that will convert files to a kindle-compatible format (mobi), and then dump it into the kindle for free using the usb cable just like any other ebook reader.  The best news I found was that project gutenberg books are already in mobi format and view just fine on the kindle, so right there you have a pretty large selection of free books without having to steal anything, look around too hard, or subscribe.

Oh yea, I tried out some magazine subscriptions on the kindle2...  Somewhat disappointing.  Some subscriptions on the kindle2 are far more expensive than the print versions (because they have no ads), the photos are grayscale, and the formatting/indexing is pretty random as far as quality and usability goes.  One magazine might have great indexing and formatting set up, while another magazine will just do an automated conversion so each article just runs into the next one, with no indexing at all.  At least kindle offers a one-month free subscription to all kindle periodicals, so you get a chance to see what the publisher is doing with the kindle version.  If the formatting is decent, it might make a lot of sense for some people to buy the kindle subscription instead of a paper subscription.  I'm not one of those people, but people who travel a lot might appreciate having a handful of magazines available at all times without having to carry around a lot of paper.

[Chalenge]

I understand the desire for electronic gadgets but here is one viewpoint I have to hit you with. No one steals books anymore.

Now the way I go about things is to buy books at the cheapest price I can and then resell them on Amazon at a profit. I have bought books for a penny and turned around and sold them for $50. Why would I pay for a $300 gadget (or $200 on sale) that can carry around X number of books when my kindle (or whatever device) and 'purchased' books (or free books) will be stolen together?

Besides now that I need a big magnifryer to read with I would probably burn the screen with sunlight or something. Seems like a bad idea.

[-tronski-]

My wife has a Kindle and loves it. There are plenty of places to obtain ebooks and she uses a free program to convert pdf to the kindle format and just drags the files into it without needing to send it off to Amazon.

 Tronsky

[Ghosth]

Challenge

My Jetbook currently has over 500 books stored on it, awaiting my pleasure.
It also has font sizes from 12 up to 32. So you wouldn't need that magnifying glass at all.
You could just read it. Also my jetbook and its 500 + books fits in my pocket, not likely to be stolen.
Lets see you do that with paper books.


Eagl I freely admit my ignorance with Kindle. Thank you for correcting me sir.
Does Kindle send you the whole book when you start reading it? Or does it just feed you a few pages at a time?

[eagl]

Eagl I freely admit my ignorance with Kindle. Thank you for correcting me sir.
Does Kindle send you the whole book when you start reading it? Or does it just feed you a few pages at a time?

There are plenty of real reasons to not like the kindle, so I figured I'd clear up that one error

The whole book shows up at once, and it's pretty fast.  The only exception is that before you buy an ebook on amazon, you can get a sample of the book to read first.  They'll send you the first dozen or so pages for free so you can see if you like it.  If you do, you can buy the book with just a couple of button clicks right on the kindle, without having to go back to your computer.  The full version will show up in the kindle within a couple of minutes.  I haven't had to wait more than 2 minutes to receive any purchased book, and the longest I waited to receive a book I emailed to my kindle acct for conversion and wireless transfer was around 10 minutes, but that was a fairly large .pdf conversion.

I will admit that I haven't tried most of the free pdf to whatever file converters, so maybe I"ll someday find one that is better than the one amazon uses.  In my experience with Amazon's free converter...  it is wholly inadequate and sucky.  It lost entire pages during the conversion process of what I thought was a fairly simple document.  The lack of native .pdf and .doc support is a major drawback to the kindle and kindle2.  I haven't seen if the kindle DX pdf support is any good or not, but amazon says it has native support for pdf so to me that means it ought to meet the basic format specifications and show those documents properly.

[Halo]

Like all modern electronics, so many choices!  Be sure to check the nook coming at Barnes and Noble.

www.BarnesandNoble.com

[Simba]

"Thanks. Very helpful. Been considering electronic books from time to time but so far haven't made the leap."

So have I, as the 4,000+ reference books and histories that presently line the walls of my apartment take a deal of moving.

<remembers the adventures he had transporting muchos libros to and from Spain when he divorced Her Lioness  >

Unfortunately, many of my books are Janes' All The World's Aircraft and such-like. Can't see Amazon digitizing them any time soon.

 

[APDrone]

Still digging..

Although.. I'm rather disappointed that the ONLY ebooks I've found in stores that you can actually get your hands on and try out are the Sony versions.

Mind you, they aren't bad little units.. the touch version has a scribble pad, and you can hilite the text, adequate text size choices, good size, allows memory cards, and not restricted to just Sony provided stores.

Thanks for that mobileread forum link, GhostH.  Lot of good stuff in there.

[Halo]

You might want to download the PC versions of the free Amazon and Barnes & Noble electronic readers. They provide a good idea of what their e-readers will be like and what publications are available on line.

I definitely prefer being able to use favorite typefaces and flush left type.

Some of the e-reader dictionaries appear to be so basic they very well might not have many of the tougher words you want to look up while reading something.

[Ghosth]

APdrone try Bed Bath and Beyond for Jetbooks.

Yes the Mobile read site is a great one for anyone interested.
Just be prepared to do some sifting of information.
Lots of people there with lots of different devices and they all have lots of things to say.
.

Also a lot of ebooks there for  free download.

[-tronski-]

Amazon just released a patch Kindle's to view pdf's

 Tronsky