[rscudder]

Well, I impulsively picked up Augen the Book - what a mouthful - at Kmart, for $100. Despite thoughts from others about it being the death of some of the smaller eBook readers, I do not think that will prove true. Compared to my Aluratek, it feels too big- but part of that is the reader is cozily embedded in a padded leather cover. It adds a lot of thickness, and I can't just pick it up and put it in my pocket, like the Aluratek will fit. On the other hand I think it could probably drop from chest high and bounce. I will hold about a normal page worth of text on the screen at once, and goes from portrait to landscape by gravity.

Some quick comments - it does have font choices if you are not looking at a PDF. It comes with Courier, DejaVu Sans, DejaVu Serif, hevetica, and Microsoft YaHei. It also can be set to simplified Chinese as the base language. After picking the font, you have 6 size choices. It shows you smaple text as you choose.

I have not been able to use it on the web- I can not figure out how to let it know what type of security my router is using, and it just keeps telling me it was not the correct passphrase for the security. I've been playing with it in a chair with it charging, so the battery life is still a real life unknown.

It has popup windows that come up sometimes- with the typical little x in the corner to close them- and I cannot figure out how to navigate to the x. Hitting menu does close the popup.

It has a joystick- not even a 1/4 inch high- which I do love. Pushing it acts as enter too.

It is a TFT screen - backlit- with a scrollbar to change the brightness. To read outside when I first got it, I turned the brightness down , and the matte screen did allow reading outside- although not as clearly as the Aluratek.

On the other hand - Augen's site takes you to a page with a picture on it - and that is the full content covering the eBook reader. A search does not give any information about doing anything on the reader- even downloading the manual. It seems like learning to use the Aluratek was much more intuitive for me - so I hope this site has people who pick one up and are better at figuring out some basics than I am.

I loaded books and music on it, and set up a similar file structure to what I had put on the Aluratek - and it doesn't seem to be able to look into lower files. I had to pull all the music out into a single huge list. On the SD card- same 32 GB as the Aluratek - I hope to have more success setting things up the way I find helpful.

It actually does show video- very darkly. And boy does that take up space. I watched part of a Dr. Who episode in .avi and then stopped and deleted the file. There seems to be no controls to affect the video except to start it and change volume- not even pause. I do not think I will use that feature much- but it might come in handy to show a movie to my backseat passengers during a car trip. Although, my netbook probably can hold its charge longer and look better. Video on a 7 inch screen, along with all the other list of features sounds great- but it is going to come down to how well those features really work.

Color sounds good - and seeing a few book covers was nice, but if it turns out I can not comfortably read outside, the trade off is not worth it.

It really does have an impressive list of formats it can read- txt, PDF, html, chm, rtf, fb2, epub, word, tcr, paml, doc, open e-book, open reader and mobi. It reads Adobe Digital DRM - although directions for that were on a yellow slip ticked into the manual.

And, rather nicely of Augen, it came with a mini CD with Calibre for the PC and Mac.

More to follow after I learn more.

Rebecca