As the country holds its breath for the long-awaited launch of Amazon's Kindle, traditional booksellers are jumping the gun by offering other ebook readers. Waterstones has chosen the impressively built, if aging, Sony Reader PRS-505 and now Borders is exclusively selling the Elonex eBook. Available for around £190, the eBook is similar enough to the Interead Cool-er to inspire a distinct sense of déjà lu (get it, French fans?). The price includes 100 pre-loaded, copyright-free classic titles.
Lightweight body
The Linux-powered eBook is clearly built on the same bones as the Cool-er, albeit with a few key differences. Out goes the Cool-er's faux-iPod plastic styling and in comes the altogether more stylish, tactile and robust matte black rubber finish.
The eBook is light, at just 180g, and comfortable to hold in one hand, although its lack of dedicated page-turn buttons forces you to use the clumsy circular navigation pad. Side-mounted menu and return buttons are small enough not to hit accidentally, and there's a rotate key for flipping into a gimmicky landscape mode. There's also a button for a terrible Sudoku game. You can use its controls to adjust the font size.
Unlike the Cool-er or the PRS-505, the eBook doesn't even attempt to play MP3 tunes. The eBook starts up and responds to menu commands slightly faster than the Cool-er, but it's much slower than the PRS-505 overall. Surprisingly, the 6-inch, e-ink display is sharp, high-contrast and very readable -- and better than the Cool-er's.
Half-finished feel
The home screen shows files by name, date or size, with no way to search through the titles, let alone through the books themselves. There's no built-in dictionary or centralised bookmark list: you have to laboriously check bookmarks inside each individual title.
The eBook has around 400MB of internal storage, which is enough for hundreds of books. It's thoughtful of Borders to pre-load 100 classics, even if they are all freely available from Project Gutenberg or Google Books. Locating them in the root menu of the eBook causes problems, however. Adding just a few titles via USB leads to file-volume errors that prevent you from saving any more. It's easy enough to solve -- just create some folders and move the books across -- but highlights the half-finished feel of this basic device.
When it comes to file flexibility, the eBook is average. The safest choice is ePub files, which display quickly and scale well to different font sizes. HTML and plain-text files are slower to load but remain readable. It's best to avoid PDFs if possible, as they can be very slow to load and render erratically. Some documents look fine, while others are almost illegible. Low-resolution JPEGs look great on the crisp eight-greyscale screen but anything over a few megapixels either fails to display or causes a restart.
The eBook easily syncs with Adobe Digital Editions for buying copy-protected ePub books from Borders or elsewhere. Don't worry that you can't see its pre-loaded titles in your library: Digital Editions only recognises ePub and PDF files, not the HTML and plain-text files used by Borders for the free titles.
Like the Cool-er, the eBook charges only via USB and gives around 8,000 page turns per charge.
Conclusion
Unless you're an ultra-weight-conscious traveller keeping track of every gram of luggage, there's little reason to buy the Elonex eBook over the Sony Reader PRS-505. Sony's device is better-built, easier to use, faster and comes with a leather case. You can even find the PRS-505 for around £40 less than the eBook at the moment.
Edited by Charles Kloet
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ebookfan 16 January 2010
Good: Nothing
Bad: Everthing espcially their customer service
Comment: My partnerpurchased an Elonex e-book reader (for £169) from Borders in Preston last month and gave that to me as a gift. A day or so into using it a thin line appeared on screen when it was on which I ignored as a minor inconvenience. A week or so later that line started widening and eventually the screen froze altogether. We contacted your customer service for a refund but were told that because Borders have now closed so we are not eligible for a refund but theyll be sending us a replacement product after you've received the faulty one. We posted that to them a day after that. Somebody from your customer service rang my partner and claimed that the screen of the ebook reader has a very thin crack and replacement will cost us £140. This is grossly unfair as there was no visible crack when the e-book reader was off. Even if we believe that a crack is there, it must have already been there (may be while moving in supply chain) when we purchased it as there has no dropping or anything like that at all. There is no evidence of physical damage, even a tiny scratch which would be there if there was any impact.
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