Ebook Reader:State of the Art Cool-Er A Kindle rival
Cool-er e-book reader ($250), from a British company called Interead, you have to sit up and take notice. It’s supposed to be just like the Amazon Kindle, but smaller, lighter, thinner and $110 less expensive. (The name Cool-er comes from “Cool E-book Reader.”)
The Cool-er has enough memory to hold 700 books, but its memory-card slot can accommodate 2,800 more books, which should just about cover your next flight.
Unlike the current Kindle, the Cool-er has a removable battery. The company says that it will offer additional batteries for $5. And one charge is good for 8,000 page turns, which is more than the Kindle or the Sony Reader.
The Cool-er has its own online store, stocked with 275,000 titles. According to Interead, they’re advertised as less expensive than on Amazon’s or Sony’s stores.
Cool-Er Ebook Reader v/s other e-reader’s
Above all, the Cool-er’s books are far less restrictively protected than Amazon’s or Sony’s. For starters, you can read one on your Mac or PC. According to Interead, starting this fall, you’ll be able to sell books you’ve written on Coolerbooks.com; you’ll keep 50 percent of each sale.
And most intriguingly of all, you can share a Cool-er book you’ve bought with four other people. Think family, buddies or book club.
That’s a huge deal. It takes a step toward addressing what may be the biggest remaining e-book gotcha: you’re stuck with your books forever. On the Kindle, for example, once you’ve finished reading a book, you can’t pass it on, sell it or even donate it to a library.
The Cool-er, at 7.2 by 4.6 by 0.4 inches, is indeed smaller than the original Kindle, by almost an inch in each direction, and it’s far lighter and thinner than the Sony Reader. In fact, it’s small enough to slip into a blazer’s inside pocket, which is handy indeed.
Once you hold it in your hands, however, fine print hits you like a sledgehammer.
Keep in mind, too, that the Cool-er lacks many of the niceties that make the Kindle feel so complete. The big one, of course, is a cellular connection; you can shop the Kindle bookstore wirelessly. The Cool-er requires you to buy books on your Mac or PC, then transfer them to the reader via a U.S.B. connection. For this purpose, you’re supposed to use a free program called Adobe Digital Editions to manage your copy-protected books to read in a ebook reader.
