ECTACO jetBook e-Book Reader

ECTACO jetBook e-Book Reader Graphite Black

"This is Great!! The screen is nicer than my wife's Kindle when looked at side by side. It will fit in my pocket in cargo pants.

I have enough books for 800-1000 years of solid reading now.

I find I read books it portrait mode mostly [sideways] and I can read books without my glasses.

The reader seems fairly well built and it is easy to use. You can even store files on it and put your books in folders of your own!

Anything can be nit-picked to death, but this is great for the money!" - By M. Yates (Virginia)

Ectaco Jetbook Mini E-Reader California Yellow

Technical Details
Multi-Language interface support for English, French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Spanish, Polish and Russian
First and only eReader in the world to run on 4 AAA batteries (Energizer batteries included)
Up to 90 hours of reading time ; All-way reading rotation for righties and lefties
5" TFT screen and smaller size for ultra portability ; Adjustable font sizes
Text alignment, spacing, breaking, and encoding options ; Clock and date functions

I had previously owned 2 Irex Iliads ebook readers, but after both failed with broken screens decided to try something different. I didn't want to buy the sony reader or the amazon kindle because of drm issues so I decided to give this a try.

At first I thought I had made a mistake, as out of the box the screen is disappointingly small. However, I have been using it for a week now, and I can say that the resolution is sufficiently good that the size of the screen is not really an issue. Mostly I can read in portrait mode, occasionally switching to landscape when I need to. There is an easily accessible button that allows me to do switch between the two very quickly. In fact, after lugging around a large Irex, I find the jetBook size very convenient. It almost fits into my pocket.

The build quality is very good: it is light and everything feels solid and reliable, with perhaps the exception of the usb and sd card cover. It is hinged on a piece of thin plastic that looks like it might break one day, though so far has been fine. The red colour is not so jarring as you might think and gives it a distinctive look.

There are many buttons on the face and sides, which means you have to be a bit careful how you hold it, but you can get used to it quickly. The buttons are well thought out, especially the numerical side buttons which make menu and page number selection a breeze. All in all, usage is pretty intuitive.

It comes with a fairly decent selection of texts included and fires up trouble free right out of the box. It can even play mp3s, although this is not something I am interested in.

The screen technology is different from the Iliad in that it uses a high resolution LCD display, rather than the electronic ink technology of the Iliad. The contrast is slightly less, but not significantly so and is certainly good enough. What is much better with the jetBook display is that page turning is much faster and there is no ghost image. It's so much better flipping pages at this speed in a way that was not possible with the Iliad. Also, startup and shutdown is almost instantaneous, so it is easy to dip in and out of a book.

The jetBook takes an sd card up to 2 gigabytes. I had no trouble using one, connecting it to my pc using the included usb cable and downloading texts. It should be noted that the machine is limited to txt and pdf files, so you cannot view lit files unless you convert. However, this is more than sufficient for me.

In summary, the jetBook does a pretty decent job. Size and weight is good, resolution is sufficient to make reading comfortable, and the speed is impressive. I would say it is still a little expensive, but so far I have been happy with it.