For those of you, especially in Australia, who are unsure of which reader to get, let me share with you some of my thoughts a few days after getting an Eco-Reader.
Let me start off by saying I am extremely, enormously, totally, unequivocally happy with it. It is everything I hoped it would be.
I have umm-ed and ahh-ed about which reader to get, and when Kindle was released internationally I thought Aha! That’s The One!, what with the Aussie dollar heading for the stratosphere, and all…
But then I thought, hang on… maybe not… let’s think about this for a bit…
I decided that what I really wanted was
1. A reader that would accept a range of formats, not just one proprietary type.
2. A reader that would accept books from a range of outlets, both here and overseas.
3. A reader that has a six inch screen.
4. A reader that is Australian sold and supported. I didn’t want to have to pack it up and send it somewhere overseas if something went drastically wrong. Similarly, I didn’t want to have to call some help desk/sales department at four in the morning to make sure the time difference was catered for in order to speak to a (real, live, English-speaking) person.
The only one that ticked all those boxes was the Eco-Reader. Sure, the price of the Kindle (and a few others) was a lot better, and sure the Eco-Reader doesn’t have whispernet, or whatever, to download direct onto the machine, but I thought the higher price was acceptable in light of all the other plusses it had.
So, I took the plunge and ordered it one Sunday afternoon via the website. By lunchtime Friday it was sitting at home waiting for me.
By dinner time Friday I had the first book loaded up and was reading it quite happily.
It came already charged, already in its snazzy leather jacket, and already loaded with 21 books. These consisted of the usual suspects (1984, Moby Dick, Pride and Prejudice [
sans Zombies], and so on) as well as some refreshingly Australian works, including My Brilliant Career, For The Term of His Natural Life, and one of Henry Lawson’s works (I would have preferred Banjo Patterson, but that’s just me
J ).
So far it has been able to handle anything I have thrown at it. The PDF file I tried did have, as has been mentioned in these forums, teeny tiny writing that could not possibly be read. However, the zoom function took care of that problem. The text is now quite readable, although the page lengths seem to have been screwed up… some screens are full of text, some are not, some only have one line in them. This is not a problem, however, apart from the extra number of page turns this requires.
The only problem occurred on Friday evening. For no apparent reason the unit locked up on me. Totally. I couldn’t get any button to work. Even plugging it back into the USB port on the computer made no difference. Prising the unit from it’s cover revealed a tiny hole marked RESET. I unbent a paperclip, inserted it into the hole, pushed, and this reset the reader. Problem fixed. So far (touch wood) this has not happened since.
The display is crystal clear, and perfectly readable. It looks, as has been commented before, just like a printed page. I guess a bigger range of available fonts, as troykm suggested in an earlier review, would be a good idea, however I tend to use only a small number of fonts in MS Word, so too many more would probably be a waste of time. Still, a few more would be good.
I have used it on the bus commuting to and from work only a couple of times so far, so I have not yet had any comments from fellow travellers, many of whom read books as well. I suspect I will get my fair share of puzzled glances from time to time.
So, in conclusion, let me say this.
Get one.
Now.
Paul,
Canberra, Australia