The Digital Reader

Software

It has a browser, music & video players, and a Notepad app as well as the reading app. You can also buy ebooks from the device, and it supports Adobe DE DRM. I’m going to pass on the video and audio players; they’re adequate extras but they aren’t good enough for them to be the main reason you get this e-reader.

BTW, while you can buy ebooks from the The Book, I wouldn’t. The ebookstore doesn’t have good prices, so you’re better off buying elsewhere.

Browser

I tried the browser, and the The Book found my Wifi network on first try. Load time for Google was good. Then it choked when I tried to get it to load GMail (that wasn’t fair, I know).

Curiously enough, opening the browser the second time didn’t cause the The Book to reconnect to my home network. I had to turn on the Wifi and connect manually. But it did remember my password.

Unfortunately, I have to say that this is not a usable browser. The Wifi range is shorter than any of my other gadgets. I couldn’t do a demo video because The Book couldn’t see the router 15 feet away in the next room.

It also takes too long to scroll the screen. You have to use the joystick to maneuver the cursor from the top of the screen to the bottom. Each time the screen refreshes the cursor will be back at the top of the screen.

And the browser is also very slow at loading pages. But the upside is you can download ebooks from Feedbooks and the like (if you’re close to the router).

NotePad

This app is very basic. It’s strictly a note taking app and it doesn’t have any formatting options. Even so, I have the feeling that if I used the The Book for any length of time I could adapt my 4 finger typing style to the Notepad app. I think I could get used to it (if not for the punctuation issues).

Library

This had a number of bugs and was short on features. It has folder support, which is good. But that’s all it has. It doesn’t have any sorting, search, or index options. It kept forgetting the SD card. Also, it insisted on using folder icons for all files. I had to guess which icon was the ebook.

Reading Experience

I tried both Epub and PDF. The Book supports Adobe DRM so I assumed that these formats would have the best support. PDF was a major disappointment. There was no reflow option, nor could I auto crop the white space. All I could do was zoom in. I also couldn’t rotate the screen (some of my PDFs are wide, not tall).

There were 5 fonts offered for Epub, which is good because the default is ugly and it added extra spaces before punctuation. Aside from bookmarks, I didn’t see any annotation abilities or a dictionary. Boy is that weird. Why else have a keyboard if not to add notes?

You can set the margins and justification for Epub, and that’s a plus. It also has TTS, but it’s rather mechanical. It’s not as good as the Kindle’s, but I was expecting that.

Hardware

Software

Conclusion & videos

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