BeBook with optional cover (not included)

Well it’s a good looking device from the Dutch company, Endless Ideas. Easier on the eye than many, including the Amazon Kindle, The BeBook sports a solid frame with simple navigation and control buttons. The battery life is supposed to last for 7000 page transitions which is among the best if you’re not listening to music at the same time, and it’s relatively light weight at just 220g. The built in whopping 512mb of memory can hold over 1000 books including PDFs. But before you rub your hands with delight at the thought of the ease of pirate books, BeBook have tried to make this difficult with some identification key that recognises illegal books that infringe copyright laws. There are probably ways around it but at least it will keep BeBook looking clean if and when legal cases hit the fan. This ebook reader is compatible with a wide range of ebook formats and file types. The list looks like this: PDF, DOC, EPUB, RAR, ZIP, MP3, PPT, TXT, HTML,  PNG, GIF, TIF, DJVU, FB2, RTF, BMP, JPG, WOL, CHM. BeBook offers 150 of the classic books all pre-loaded for you to enjoy or delete, and there are heaps more freebee ebooks for download off the mybebook.com website.

The ebook reader is easy to read from, even in direct sunlight, but like many others there is no backlight so forget about leaving the light off in bed. The screen resolution is 800×600 and has 4 gray scales, which isn’t that great but doesn’t affect much more than images. Letters on the eink screen are nicely formed and very legible like a real paper book.

In summary. the BeBook is a great piece of device and has been a welcomed success in the market. There is a version 2 due to be on sale in Summer 2009 so we’ll wait to get our hands on that one. Perhaps some of the little annoyances and gltches that we haven’t gone into detail here will be ironed out. Some of the formats do come up against it and you’ll see some delays during page turns. These bugs are small and relatively insignifant so all in all i’d have to give thie device a thumbs up. The mulitple formats, making this ebook reader pretty much open source is a big winner for the BeBook. Its a sturdy design with a user friendly interface so you won’t be disapointed. Perhaps hold your horses for the BeBook2 which is due soon though.