Foxit takes on the eBook world with low(er) cost eSlick

Never mind those eBay prices for the Kindle, and don't pay any attention to the $399 sticker attached to Sony's Reader -- instead, feast your eyes on this gem. The $259 eSlick is expected to arrive courtesy of Foxit this January, and if you jump in early, you'll be able to get it for just $229. Sure, it doesn't include that fancy connectivity like on the Kindle, but we suspect you'll get over the lack of subscriptions pretty quick given all the coin you'll save up front. The unit is said to be around the size "of a medium paperback," checking in at 0.4-inches think and featuring a 6-inch 800 x 600 resolution display. The panel itself is made by the same firm that provides panels for Amazon, and it'll ship with 128MB of inbuilt memory along with a 2GB SD card. As for longevity, you can expect to get about 8,000 turns before it caves from exhaustion, and if your eyes tire, the unit can double as an MP3 player. Lookie here -- we just found you the perfect device to spend your holiday card money on. You're welcome.

[Via PC World]

[Plothole Posted Dec 20th 2008 5:16AM]

@Micheal

I do fine just charging my Sony Reader just once a week. Doing it daily would be rather excessive IMO.

[Qeana Posted Apr 9th 2009 5:17AM]

There is a converter that allows you to convert various types of documents and e books to LRF (Sony's proprietary BBeB format).
Might be useful for someone - http://www.lib2go.com

[Sic Tr4nsit Posted Dec 19th 2008 8:09AM]

Honestly, I don't see why more publications don't subsidize the price through adverts ala Esquires 25th ann. issue.

News papers could save a fortune and the earth would benefit greatly if the readers were made right. Imagine dropping $100 on a reader that comes with a newspaper/magazine sub that can read other non-proprietary formats(doubtful). That would truly rock.




weAREengadget
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05Nk8CH5UVc

[DonDon Posted Dec 19th 2008 9:55AM]

Can any of these e-book devices handle manga .jpg/.png reasonably well yet? Or know of a program that turns picture files into usable .pdfs easily?

[htd Posted Dec 19th 2008 10:04AM]

isnt the sony ereader just $269.99 with $50 in free books?

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 19th 2008 10:26AM]

Another reincarnation of the same hardware. As some mentioned earlier, this is also known as Cybook Gen3 or PocketBook 301. Different software companies developing their own version of the firmware and, IMHO, the PocketBook 301 has the best at the moment. It supports FB2, TXT, PDF, DJVU, RTF, HTML, PRC, CHM formats:

http://pocketbook.com.ua/index.php?id=185

The website is in Russian, but you can browse and get the idea.

[ChaoZ Posted Dec 19th 2008 2:58PM]

I wish Amazon would just release the second gen Kindle already and make it available worldwide (or at least Canada).

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 22nd 2008 4:27PM]

argh want now

[SLowrAM Posted Dec 22nd 2008 7:08PM]

I am very interested in this, but one does have to consider all the extras of the Kindle such as the book availability and book prices, keyboard, and dictionary. I would love to put all my development books on one of these devices, but if I did so I'd definitely want to be able to lookup keywords. I wonder how well reflowing pdfs with occasional images work, anybody have experience with this on a Sony, I'm wondering how well it would reflow a video game manual and similar pdfs? Several of my development books are chm format, any decent chm to pdf converters?
I like Foxit software and I'm strongly leaning towards this ebook reader (getting all that software I've been close to buying before anyhow makes it a super bargain) mostly because of the price and pdf support (built in). The biggest hesitation for me is the lack of keyboard - if it were touchscreen an onscreen keyboard would be great as it wouldn't make the device bigger.