Yesterday I got my hands on a eBook reader, and I got mighty impressed. The Bookeen Cybook ePaper has the perfect size and is therefor easy to carry around. As I work on computers all day long, and have to stare on back lit LCD displays, I have been quite skeptical to eBooks. In fact, if the document I am to read is longer then 2-3 A4 pages, I prefer to print it out. I swear that I could feel my eyes relaxing when I read on the Cybook, it is the closest thing to reading paper that I have ever seen. Imagine being able to have all the Windows and MacOS X manuals with you when solving problems at work! Cool, isn’t it? Well, that is not the main reason why I want to buy it. I work at the university and at our department, we recently started making our scientific staff’s research/publications available as PDFs. Until now we have printed them and handed them to the students, and with making them available as PDF we hope to reduce cost and use of paper.

eBook Readers have suddently become amazingly popular, and we can thank Amazon for that. Their wireless reader Kindle became a success. Most likely cause of the possibility of buying books online directly from the device. It’s just that I don’t like Kindle’s design, as it is a book reader, I don’t want to have a thumbnail keyboard built in. The device is simply to big! Another problem is the inbuilt wireless card, it shortens the battery life. Cybook doesn’t have a keyboard and wireless card, and therefor achieves ultra-low power consumption. And what is better, it has a a thin, light form, and fits perfectly in your hands. The Cybook dimensions are very close to the ones of a paperback. As a paperback, the Cybook can be easily arranged in a hand bag. The size is 188 x 118 x 8.5 mm, and the weight is as low as 174 g.

The Cybook shows an outstanding black and white screen, utilizing a breakthrough technology: the Electronic Ink Display (E Ink®). The screen simply acts like a paper page. It’s amazing! The screen is not backlit, and it uses ambient light to enlighten the reading surface, so you cannot use it when it’s dark. On the other hand, the Cybook is readable in full sunlight which is not the case for almost all standard LCD displays.

eBooks are simple data files, and can be transfered with a USB cable from a host computer by drag and dropping your files. No software installation, no synchronization process, no file conversion, and best of all the Cybook is compatible with any kind of host computer (Windows®, Linux, Mac®). Can it get easier? The following file formats are supported: MobipocketTM .PRC, PalmDoc, TXT, HTML and PDF. Amazon bought Mobipocket.com back in 2005, so why on earth did they go for another format (AZW – Kindle Edition)? It’s a little bit confusing what motives Amazon have for not choosing a format they already had the rights to. So a big NOTE: You cannot read Kindle eBooks on the Cybook device. When I started diving in to the various eBook formats available, I discovered an article over at Engadget, that an hacker had discovered the algorithm that Kindle uses to turn regular Mobipocket books into Amazon’s proprietary .azw format. So there we go, Amazon is doing their version of iTunes Music Store and iPod: Here you have an amazing collection of books, but you can only read them on our devices!

So where to get content? First of all you can save your files in all the supported formats. Many books are also available for free, and a good starting point is then MANYBOOKS.NET. The site is ran by my friend Matthew McClintock, you might know him for his BeOS SVG icons. Thousands of books are also available in the Mobipocket format (an encrypted and unencrypted format). According to Bookeen more then 200 resellers are using this format, so also the Norwegian Online Book Shop Digitalbok.no.