Amazon recently started exporting the Kindle to other countries, so I bought one. Amazon struggled to negotiate deals with European carriers, which was one reason why the Kindle was not already available to the European market, so instead, the Kindle roams from the AT&T network.

The features are fairly similar to those available to American customers. One can subscribe to and download newspapers, magazines and buy and and download books. One can’t, however, download the images inside the newspapers and magazines, browse the Web or subscribe to blogs. This is all down through a mobile internet connection, either 3G/GPRS.

The 3G coverage in my house is somewhat intermittent, although I still think it is just about tolerable. I find a 2G signal perfectly reasonable for downloading a book or browsing the Kindle store. I initially thought it strange that the Kindle lacks WiFi, unlike many of its competitors, but I have since realised that WiFi is unneeded.

As the mobile internet coverage is included in the purchase price of the Kindle, Amazon prevent users from browsing the web on it outside the US due to the high costs they would face. This would prove annoying to some users, although I imagine web browsing on the Kindle would prove clumsy, due to fact it’s black and white.

The Kindle can also play MP3s, so audiobooks, music and podcasts can be placed on it. I believe that you need to connect the Kindle to a computer to transfer them onto it. For books, magazines and newspapers, no computer is needed. Files can be coverted into Kindle format by emailing it to an address that will automatically send them to the Kindle (at 0.99USD/MB), by using a free Kindle email conversion service and transferring the files via USB, or by using software like Calibre. The Kindle handles the Mobipocket format, so you can get free public domain books from websites like Feedbooks and transfer them on.

The battery life is very good, due to the way text is displayed. E Ink, which the Kindle employs, has extremely low energy consumption. If you turn the wireless off, it can keep going for weeks without being charged. Charging takes a couple of hours, although the charger supplied is a US socket. It does charge via USB so this isn’t an issue.

It has a couple of other nice touches, too. One can annotate texts, have them read aloud via a text-to-speech feature (although this doesn’t work very well) and has a very attractive standby screen which rotates between different images of different writers and writing-related objects.

The International Kindle costs $260, plus postage and import tax. Altogether, mine cost around $340. This is equivalent to about £210 or €225; roughly the same as its competitors. The mobile internet is a big selling point which many competitors lack. They are only purchasable from Amazon.com, so any discounts or vouchers you may have for other Amazon sites won’t work. Also, books are only available from Amazon.com, so you pay notice the absence of the work of your country’s authors. I hope that eventually we will be able to relink our Kindles to our own national Amazon sites, although there is no certainty (or even indication) that Amazon will permit this.

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Actually, I think this is a great idea. Consumers do not want multiple devices to carry and that is the main reason why convergent devices came in to existence. But even as newer devices are brought in to the market by the companies, we find ourselves owning multiple devices that we would love to carry with us. But we also want to travel light. So it’s usually a toss up between cramming the netbook, the eBook reader, the large smartphone and a PMP into your bags or carrying just your smartphone and maybe the netbook.

However, you cannot use either a netbook or a smartphone under direct sunlight and the battery life is usually not conducive to hours of reading. So Entourage’s idea is to give you something that will let you read books and surf the net at the same time.

They give you an e-Ink using eReader screen that is 9.6” diagonal (1200×825 pixels) and has all the features of an eBook reader – like zooming, taking notes directly on the book, glare free screen and the ability to read under direct sunlight. Using its various connectivity options, which I am coming to in a bit, you can choose to store your notes and journals on a server, email them to a friend or just keep them on the device.

The screen accepts stylus input, so you can open a new journal page and draw on the screen. Text can be input by hand or by Bluetooth keyboard. The e-paper is Wacom Penabled, which is how you are able to draw on it. It supports both ePub and PDF formats, so you are pretty much covered on that area.

What is does not have is an attached online store like the new Barnes & Noble’s Nook or the Amazon Kindle. But I do not see that as a deal breaker. There are enough ways to get Books these days.

The netbook side is pretty basic. It has a 10.1” color touchscreen that displays 1024×600 pixels. The two screens are connected with each other and you can view the images on your ebook in full color on the netbook screen. It has a webcam and microphone that allow you capture video, still images and audio respectively. You have the option of hooking a microphone up to it if you want better quality audio recording . It as built in speakers as well. It supports Mp3, MP4 and 3GP file formats.

You can browse the Internet, check and write emails, playback audio and video and type out long documents via Bluetooth keyboard if you so wish. It has an on-screen keyboard that you can use while chatting.

By the way, this is an Android device. No wonder they can claim so many things about the software.

Coming to connectivity, it has a lot of options for you. It has Bluetooth, 3G, WiFi b/g (no ‘n’) along with optional EVDO or HSDPA mobile modem. You can have only one type of modem. Battery life is decent for such a device – 16 hours for the ebook reader only and 6 hours for the LCD screen only. I am suspecting about 8-9 hours with heavy netbook usage from time to time and long hours of ebook reading.

The inbuilt memory is 4GB, with 3GB available to the user, but you can take it up to 32GB with the included SD card slot. There are USB 2.0 ports as well. It will start shipping from February 2010 and is priced at $490. One thing that I do not get is why they charge $40 extra for getting it in a color other than the ‘midnight blue’.

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Barnes and Noble has finally made its new eBook reader official. But we already knew pretty much everything about it way before it came out, with the final details falling leaking into place hours before the actual launch event took place.

But before B&N’s Nook (that’s what it’s called) had a chance to see daylight, another company knew that it had to do something or else it would be lost in the landslide of Nok coverage. This company is Spring Design and they have an eBook reader too. It is called Alex and it is very similar to the Nook.

The Nook and the Alex are both dual screen devices. They both have Android powered smaller LCD touchscreens at the bottom and the e-Ink screen on top. The LCD touchscreens on both turn off when you start reading on them. And they have similar design and dimensions.

They both have a speaker, support MP3 playback, support EPUB and PDF and a multitouch touchscreen that supports gestures.

Then there are the differences. First, the Nook is actually out and you can check it out at Nook.com, while Alex is still in the labs without any word when the thing will be released. Spring Design had some rendered shots and then followed up with a wobbly video of the thing in action.

Alex has a ‘read’ button between the two screens and it works to zap whatever’s on the touchscreen on to the reader screen and turns off the LCD screen. This is as true for books, as it is for web pages. So if you want to read this article on the Alex, you can browse to this page and hit the ‘read’ button to ‘print’ the article on to the reader screen. It will be rendered exactly but everything will be in 12-shades of grey.

You know… 12-shades of grey will actually make a pretty cool name for a book or an album. Never mind.

The Barnes&Noble Nook does not have this feature because the company’s president Willian Lynch himself tells you that a browser on an eBook reader is ‘clumsy’. Fair enough. So the Nook is limited in that sense. Alex’s video presenter clearly says that it has standard Android running and hence has all the different apps that you would expect it to have, including what looked like a fully functional mobile browser that can render full web pages.

Even though Alex’s ‘Reader’ app has a shopping option, we are quite sure it won’t be something that competes with Amazon or B&N. So the Nook has the upper hand with its exclusive content and integration with B&N’s eBook store. Although, may be being free to choose your own source all the time is not such a bad thing.

B&N charges for RSS feeds, while the Alex will probably get them to you for free because it has a more flexible Android. You can directly print the RSS articles on to the reader screen for reading. You won’t be able to click links but I don’t think you will be able to do that on the Nook’s EPUB’d RSS feeds either.

When comparing these two, you have to look past the striking resemblance to see how different they actually are. I started out thinking that the B&N has the clear upper hand here. But if the Alex is released in to the market before the Nook or the current Kindle is upgraded to be more flexible, we might have a compelling convergent device on our hands.

What do you think? Leave a comment below and tell us which one you like better.

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But for some the stumbling block comes when you’re trying to sync such a device with one or various operating systems. This can be a problem for anyone who uses anything but Windows. Fortunately where there is a demand, there is a supply. For those who have a Sony Reader you’re in luck. Thanks to one Kovid Goyal there is a wonderful interface to allow you to manage a book collection (including news feeds) for your Sony Reader. This interface is called Calibre. This tool can sync ebooks to the main memory of your device or to a memory card with ease. Calibre works in Linux, Mac, and Windows.

Calibre is supported in the following distributions:

• Ubuntu
• Exherbo
• Debian
• Foresight

I did get Calibre installed on Elive+Compiz without any problems. The only thing you need to make sure you have is xdg-utils installed before you issue the binary installation command. Once you have xdg-utils installed issue the following command:
sudo python -c "import urllib2; exec urllib2.urlopen('http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/download_linux_binary_installer').read(); main()"
This installation take a bit because it has to download the source. The good news is you do not have to intervene during the installation.

Main Window

Once the installation is complete you can run the software with the command calibre.

As you can see (in the image to the left) the user interface is very intuative. From this window you can manage books, edit meta information, manage news feeds, sync to your device, save to disk, and more.

But how do you add a book? Simple. Say you want to download and install Dracula by Bram Stoker. You can get this book for free from free-eBooks.net. Once you have the title downloaded you will want to click the Add Books button, navigate to where you have the book downloaded, select the book, and click Open.

Once the book has been added you will see it listed in the main window. You might have to adjust the details of the book. This will depend upon who did the original conversion of the book and if they entered the meta data correctly. Editing this data is simple: Highlight the book and click the Edit Meta Information button.

Adding News Feeds

Adding Newsfeed

Of course you will want to have your gHacks RSS feeds with you as you travel. To add a feed click on the drop-down arrow to the right of the Fetch News button and select Add A Custom News Source. The image to the right shows all of the information needed for adding a news feed. You can even set it up to auto-update feeds. Pretty slick.

Once you are satisfied with your library you can send your books and news to your device. To do this plug in your device and, once it is recognized, click the Send To Device button.

If you press the drop down to the right of the Send To Device button you can select to send your books to your device and then delete them from your local library, send the books to the devices main memory, send the books to the devices memory card, or send only specific formats to the device.

Final Thoughts

It’s about time someone wrote a reliable interface for ebook readers that is reliable, simple to use, and (best of all) cross platform. Now those of you using the Linux operating system do not have to wait around to purchase that Sony Reader!

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Calibre provides the means to import ebooks that are stored on the computer system. It will display information like titles, authors, sizes, publishers and ratings in the default view mode. This can be changed to view the ebooks by cover or by tags instead.

Missing information can be edited manually or by pulling information from an Internet server that can retrieve information based on author, title or ISBN. The ebook management software is compatible with many file formats including the popular pdf, lit, mobi, cbz, cbr, txt and various others including zip and rar.

The ebooks can be launched and displayed in the default viewer of the selected file format from within the program’s interface. It is furthermore possible to convert single or multiple ebooks into different formats and sync them with electronic devices. Supported ebook readers include Amazon’s Kindle 1 and 2, Apple’s iPhone, SONY PRS 500/505/700 and Cybook Gen 3.

Another interesting feature is the ability to fetch RSS news feeds which are then made available in epub format by default with the option to convert it into a different format.

Calibe can run a (protected) server application that provides access to the ebook library from all computers with a web browser and Internet connection.

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A viable alternative was announced some time ago in 2008 in the form of the Txtr Ebook Reader. The reader does not use DRM, supports a much broader format spectrum including pdf, html, Office and ePub formats, provides an Open Software architecture and uses a Linux kernel. It offers the same screen resolution as the Amazon Kindle 2 which is 600×800 pixels. The device makes use of an integrated accelerometer to automatically detect the orientation of the device and display the text accordingly.

Another difference is the design of the Txtr ebook reader which has been streamlined to be usable with one hand. Other specs of the device are:

• eInk Vizplex 6″ display at 600×800 pixels
• 146mm x 128.2mm x 8mm, 260g
• Freescale ARM11 CPU 532MHz
• 64MB SDRAM onboard
• MicroSD memory card slot
• 8GB MicroSD card included
• internal 3G/GPRS modem
• USB 2.0 cable connection
• Bluetooth 2.1 for audio, external keyboard and future enhancements
• WiFi

The device will be released in the third quarter of 2009 in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The price is unknown at this point in time. If you are looking for an ebook reader that supports a wide range of document formats out of the box and does not come with DRM then it might be a device to recon with. The main drawbacks are the missing “ebook library” that Amazon supplies and the availability and price.

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