I was given an ECO Reader as a present about a month ago. Initially I thought it was pretty neat - I'd never actually used an e-ink device before.
How wrong I was.
The first book I've loaded onto it is
Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton. I bought it in .mobi format from the US (I live in Australia so had to go through some hoops to convince the US store I wasn't Australian, but that's another gripe for another day
). I loaded it onto the device to discover that the DRM wasn't supported. This lead me to find a program that strips off the DRM and after doing so I loaded the DRM-less file and started reading. What a
pain.
So after reading it for about 1,500 pages (of 2,900) I have noticed three things:
- the reader crashes about every 50 page transitions,
- when I leave the book and come back it forgets what page I was on, and
- I can no longer set bookmarks. The interface for doing so just does nothing when I attempt to set a new one and all my old bookmarks are gone!
Seriously, this is all pretty fundamental functionality for an e-book reader and it fails on every count!
I'm now writing down the page number when I stop reading (or when it freezes up pre-crash) so I can manually enter the page number when I load the book up again.
But that's not all! When I do enter the page number that it indicated I was on I find it's not the actual page I was reading! I have to usually skip forwards between 10 and 500(!) pages to find the page I was actually reading!
Last time I did this (to check the firmware version was up to date) I noted down "2043" and when I re-loaded the book it had me at page "1611". I manually entered "2043" and discovered that I needed to skip forwards to "2081" to get to the actual page I was reading!
Piece. Of. Crap.