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1. 

   Joe
   November 7th, 2009 - 21:54

   I’ve had my Jetbook for 5 months now, and I still love it. Portability is my favorite feature. It can fit in your pants pocket, and it also should fit easily in any purse, and comes with an attractive snug-fitting case/cover as well.

   The screen is 5″, vs. Kindle’s 6″. But that’s fine, it’s still clear with lots of room. (The kindle doesn’t actually even use its full 6″ screen). There’s no backlighting, but as long as you’re in a well lit area you’ll be able to view the screen to just fine. None of the other popular ebook readers feature backlighting btw.
   
   I could’ve bought a Kindle but I went with this device instead (after a couple months of study) because:
   
   1) it’s smaller, but still has a nice big screen
   
   2) freedom of use: meaning I’m not bound by, or tied to Amazon for what ever books I may need. (or what files I may need to convert to ‘Kindle’ format: Amazon has to convert your PDF files for you.. I’m not crazy about that idea.)
   
   3) The manufacturer (Ectaco) has been making handheld devices (translators) for almost 2 decades. And I figured they would make a solid, well built device that didn’t look cheap. (And that turned out to be so. I purchased the one in black, and it looks Sharp, and doesn’t feel ‘cheap.’)

   With that said, there are a couple things to be aware of:
   
   The ideal file format for the device is a Text File (.txt). Some PDF’s will look fine, but only if they’ve been OCR’d and properly recognized as text. Otherwise the PDF file will look like it’s original screen image, and be hard to read on the smaller screen.

   I experimented with a bunch of other formats (the device can read many different types) but I finally got tired of having to deal with different formats, and I just convert any PDF files I have into Text. Then they can be read beautifully on the device, and you can resize the font at will.
   
   Adobe Acrobat Pro is naturally the best tool for converting to Text. But another great (and FREE) tool is from Foxit Software. You can find it here:
   
   [...]
   
   As mentioned, the Size of the Jetbook is a big plus. You can hold it in one hand (like a paperback) and change pages with ease. And unlike the space-consuming keyboard on the Kindle, this device has an ingenious set of input keys on the Side.

   So if you’re a bit of a Techie, and you know where to find books online (Project Gutenberg is one good site); and if you won’t have trouble converting files to Text, then I think you’ll love the jetbook.

   The only feature of the Kindle that I envy is its new text-to-speech feature. But even still, The kindle’s Size defeats the purpose, because it’s then too large to carry around like an mp3 device. You have to be stationary with it, in order to most easily listen.
   
   So instead, I just convert my ebook files into mp3 Audio (with a great program called “TextAloud”) and then I can use an mp3 player to listen to the book if I’m moving around, until the next time I can sit and actually read from the Jetbook.
   
   Rating: 4 / 5
2. 

   M. Yates
   November 7th, 2009 - 22:19

   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. Less than 200$ at newegg.

   No DRM’d books will work, but there are lots of classics and bittorrent and a program called ‘dedrm’. [You BUY the book first, then dedrm it.]

   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!
   Rating: 5 / 5
3. 

   Tallgrass
   November 7th, 2009 - 23:36

   First of all let me admit that I read e-books periodically. Not a lot of them, but a few dozen every year. Think of this kind of a situation: It’s 1 a.m. and I’ve just finished a book I really liked, don’t want to go to sleep yet and but want to read more by the same author. At this time of the night, most bookstores are closed, Amazon would take at least a day to ship. So I go online, go to an ebookstore and see if there is an ebook available.

   So on a spur of the moment whim a few months back I bought an ebook reader. The Ectaco was about [...]than the kindle so I figured why not. For the first about 3 months I used it non-stop. I loved the fact that I could carry it around with me at all times. I loved the fact that I could read books that I would be embarrassed to actually read in public – (Yes I admit to going though a short uncomfortable Bodice-Ripper and Dragonlance book stage) And I loved the fact that I could carry around a few hundred books with me at all times.

   Then I started to have problems:

   First of all the Ectaco reader only reads none of the standard ebook formats such as you find at [...] Which means you can’t actually buy your ebooks, but either have to rely on stuff that is already in the Public Domain or go to the Warez sites and get pirated e-books.

   Secondly the native memory of the Jetbook is around 100MB but you can add memory up to 2GB which sounds good, but the actual hardware of the Jetbook doesn’t work. When I plug the Jetbook in, the 100MB appears as an extra drive, about 10% of the time the second 2GB card appears but most of the time it doesn’t and if I try to load anything bigger than 10MB or so, the system crashes.

   Thirdly sometimes the whole thing just freezes up. Usually fixing this requires pushing a pen, or a paperclip into the reset button in the back and everything comes back fine. But it is still a pain.

   About the only really good feature this reader has, is the ability to turn the text on it’s side. In other words, if the font size is too small reading it vertically, you can press one button, and hold the device horizontally and get a bigger font size, but see less on the screen.

   Rating: 2 / 5

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