Nose buried in an LCD screenIt is easy to pick up the jetBook with just two fingers - it is as thin as a paperback novel.
A handy button lets you flip its 5-inch greyscale display from landscape to portrait mode, which works for photo viewing too.
The made-in-China gizmo's acumen lets the display successfully mimic the look of a printed page along with crisp and clear text. It makes for comfortable reading for hours on end in a room with decent lighting. But a dim room will leave you scrambling for a lamp as the screen lacks a powerful backlight.
The jetBook comes preloaded with dozens of free e-books such as Sherlock Holmes novels, which saves you the trouble of downloading these classic titles from Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org), for instance.
As a bonus, you also get the CIA World Factbook which lists tons of facts and figures of countries.
I have had a quiet time recently. Instead of devouring books like there’s no tomorrow my wife has had her nose stuck in her new ebook reader and now she wants to give a review of it.All described ECTACO products can be purchased at www.ectaco.com or national distributors. You are welcome to send your questions or comments to PR@ectaco.com
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I had wanted an ebook reader for ages and between waiting for the perfect design to come along and not wanting to get sucked into anything proprietary, I finally settled on the Ectaco JetBook Lite. I say settled because it didn’t fulfill all my nitpicky design desires, but as I got it on sale for CAD$129 I figured it would do until something I liked better came along. However, after about three weeks of use, I could not be happier with it.
At about five by seven inches wide it is perfect for holding in my hand, not too heavy or too light. In fact, as this version runs on four AA batteries, the battery pack makes the whole thing nicely balanced to be held easily in the left hand, and the slide bar allows for one handed page turning, in both directions (there is also a button on the bottom for turning pages). The screen is LCD but is very easy to read for hours at a stretch. The slow page turns and ‘flash’ when you turn the page that you get with e-ink are not a problem here. There’s no wi-fi on this thing, so you have to load your books off your computer. And it doesn’t play MP3s, but who cares. That’s why you have an iPod. If I had to make any criticism at all, I wish it came some sort of cover to protect the screen so I could shove it into my purse. Or one of those rubber scuba suit things that people put on their iPhones.
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