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I find the CyBook's dictionary lookup function extremely straightforward to use, personally.
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It’s not about the speed of the dictionary lookup, it’s about the best one… and it’s the Cybook hands down.
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You gotta be kidding, both of you. Sure, a trained monkey could do that, only it'd have to be a very patient trained monkey. And it's the best all right, but that isn't hard to accomplish, if you're in a category of one.
The lookup function on cybook is designed in the worst way possible. It takes way too many key presses to navigate to the word you want translated (you have to go through the menu first, that's 4 to 5, then you have to select the word, that's between 1 and 15, depending on the position of the word in the text and the number of lines per page). Then you have to press another button to go back to the book you've been reading. So this whole procedure makes your display refresh twice, something you're battery won't be too happy about. That's what I call great ergonomics, optimization and a real timesaver. Moreover, the dictionary searches only for exact matches, not the closest match, what makes it useless half the time you want to look up a word. (I could swallow that, if cybook supported indexes, but it doesn't).
Bottomline: if you occasionaly want to look up a word (once or twice per page) the lookup function is tolerable. Otherwise it's an annoyance.
If you don't insist on mobi dictionaries, you might want to consider pocketbook, which is also a netronix. From what I've heard, it should support two types of dictionaries xdxf (an open xml format,e.g. stardict) and Lingvo (see wikipedia entry), with actual search function (!) (though you better ask the manufacturer to confirm that). They have an icq number on their website, so you can ask them whatever you want.