Upstart company Interead is looking to jump into the ever-expanding library of
e-book readers with its debut, the COOL-ER. Company founder Neil Jones describes it as the "iPod moment that e-readers have been waiting for," calling the device the first of its kind to be designed specifically for the non-technologically inclined reader in mind. Indeed, the aesthetics seems to borrow liberally from the iPod nano, and features eight different color options. It weighs in at 6.3 ounces, or a little less than half of the Kindle 2, with the same 6-inch e-ink screen, and is small enough to fit comfortably in your jacket pocket, he says. It's got 1GB internal memory and a SD card slot, as well as a 2.5mm headphone jack with a 3.5mm converter bundled with every device. The feature set is pretty barebones, with no keyboard, text-to-speech, WiFi, or
Whispernet equivalent -- all files have to be loaded via USB or SD card -- but in its place is a more attractive $250 MSRP, and Jones assures us at that price the company'll be making a profit on each unit sold. Format support includes EPUB, TXT, JPEG, any kind of PDF, MP3 for audio, and eight languages including Russian and traditional / simplified Chinese. The company's also launching an e-book store and offering an extra discount for customers who register their COOL-ER. It'll go on sale May 29th for US and Europe via its website, with retail distribution partner expected to be announced closer to the launch date. We're gonna wait until we get a few chapters into
Alice in Wonderland before giving a final verdict, but in the meantime, check out our initial hands-on in the gallery below.
Read - Product page
Read - Online store
posted May 14th 2009 9:22AM
I for one think it is darn sexy. Its always nice to see a device that combines aesthetic value and function. The kindle looks cheap and it has too many features (I dont want to annotate my books), and why would I want a keyboard on an e-book reader? I personally would rather just download books to my SD cards. That way I could easily share them with my wife without having to actually trade readers. Plus we cant get the kindle in Canada anyway. I really cant get over how cheap the kindle looks though (the keyboard doesn't help). This may not be "the product" but it is a step in the right direction.
But, can it reflow PDF? That's the one gripe I have about my PRS-500.... And no way to I want to deal with Amazon's draconian policies.
@seveng "And no way to I want to deal with Amazon's draconian policies."
Which draconian policies?
Letting you transfer books to your Kindle via USB for free?
Offering an optional conversion and wireless transfer service for 15 cents per megabyte (books are typically 200-400K)
Directly reading AZW, MOBI, PRC, TXT, JPEG, GIF files.
Offering free conversion services for DOC, RTF, HTM, & PDF files (in case you don't want to do it yourself with free tools like Mobipocket & Calibre).
Letting you get books from a large number of non-Amazon bookstores?
Shocking!
What I think he's saying is that he's afraid to send the PDF e-books he pirated off of torrent to Amazon's conversion service, because their "draconian" policy of supporting their customers (consumers, publishers, and authors) might lead him to getting caught with something he didn't pay for.
Never fear, though. Calibre is free and will convert your PDF or LIT books to MOBI no matter where you acquired them. You need not subject yourself to Amazon's free service if you don't want to.
I love my Kindle... But then, I'm a reader. I get the feeling that half of the guys complaining about it here are just looking for something to read downloaded manga on, and they're just not the target audience.
If they can get this in stores like Wally Marts and get the price to $199, Kindle will be gone..
I would say this is the first e-reader I would actually consider buying. I mean, I considered the Kindle until I saw the price tag, but for this, I considered it, then saw the price tag, then sort-of considered it again.
If it were under $175 I would probably pull the trigger right away, but we'll see.
Wow.
The first ACTUAL iPod ripoff, and not one "IPOD RIPOFF" post?
Are the Apple fanboys asleep this morning?
so if someone says that thing looks like an ipod, they are immediately an apple fanboy???
i think it looks like a kindle... IM A KINDLE FAN BOY
If it is the iPod moment for e-readers, why does it have a very old scroll wheel? And what you you need a scroll wheel on such a unit for? Seems its placed in a pretty bad spot. Your palm will be scrolling that thing all over the place.
And without a cellular connection it still costs that much?
I'll wait for the REAL iPod moment in eBook readers when Apple releases something with REAL innovative features. Nobody else gives a hoot about industrial design. And that's the key to Apple's success. It's not that they do have good industrial design, it's because nobody else does on the same level of dedication, and attention to detail. Why? Two words. Bean counters.
Byebye COOL-ER.
1. Not cheap enough
2. Not qualitative enough (made out of plastic, despite the aluminium like finish)
3. Does not have any new and interesting concepts.
4. Terrible name choice.
Whatever this company thought made the iPod so popular, they have failed.
I can't wait for an actually decent one though.
The thing that is keeping me out of the market right now, other than what I percive as a farily high price for readers, is the limited sources of ebooks. I'm not too keen on giving amazon $10 a book. There are lots of free out of copyright books and that's good, but what I really want is to be able to get ebooks from my library. There are some services like that out there now, but they are still a little young. I wouldn't mind seeing a all you can eat subscription package either. If I could checkout as many books as I wanted to read for about $10 a month per reader I would go out and buy two of these things right away. Hopefully, we'll see more and more books coming out in digital format, that too will help.
A tiered subscription service would also be a good option, say $5/month for two books, $10/month for 5 books, and $15/month for all you can eat. Produce two ereaders to go with this. An inexpensive one, say $150-200, that has few bells and whistels. (e.g. no touch screen, no keyboard) but give it WiFi for book downloads and SD/microSD/USB support for sideloading and desktop support. Make a more expensive one that adds 3G for on the go downloading. Frankly, however, I don't think 3G is essential. the Kindle has created that paradigm but and caught the attention of the masses but I still don't think its nessecary. If the new ereader can be equated more with an ipod people can realate to it. People are used to loading songs onto their ipod from itunes, my mother can do that.
In the end, for me, the cost of ebooks has to be price competitive with the cost of used books. Say $2-5. I think it needs to be competitive because I'm not sure people are willing to pay a premium for the utility of an ebook. Rather the publisher needs to pay the buyer a premium to compensate for the intangability of ebooks. That's why I think that a subscription model is a good option.
I don't know about yours, but my local library does lend e-books.
Check into it. If they don't do it, then propose it.
omg! it looks like an i- ... oh shit, im going to get lowranked..
fire your photographer. take a picture of the thing without it running off the screen
Price is too high. Someone will do OK in this market if they can come out with something under $200. Also, if it handles pdf files but can't reflow them then it is worthless for pdf files. The text would be way too small to read.
Already, the sony PRS 505 seems "old" due to its lack of any wireless support. This device is too far behind where the market is.
Prices won't drop for a while because e-ink is still relatively new, relatively hard to produce, and still being perfected. When e-ink becomes common and easy to produce, you'll see a sharp drop in e-reader prices.
Yeah they keep saying that but now that they sold like 600,000 knidles easy you'd think that the low volume argument would start to be silly, I'll buy the newness of the tech, I don't buy the amount you can sell of it being too low anymore.
This thing looks absolutely wicked, I would go and get one right now after work if they were availiable yet. You could fill a card with all the books you'd ever want to read and not even worry about wifi and 3g and stuff. I mean, when do you ever decide, cripes, I really need to have that latest book right this instant?
Isn't this what we wanted Apple to bring out in June? Plus e-ink display, which Apple will not provide.
As for me, I don't want a wireless connection. I don't want a 3G book store. Such things are well and good, and someday I shall have them.
But I have thousands of e-books in .txt, .pdf, .lit, .rtf, and .html format which I've been saving for years, waiting for a decent ebook reader that looks like an iphone, only larger. No keyboard, just a control button. Touchscreen would be nice, but it isn't necessary. It should be cheap, easy to load, and *not provide* a detailed database of my reading and book purchasing habits to the company and the government. A simple USB cable for power and data. Tough enough not to shatter if your drop it, or crush easily in a backpack.
And they have a bookstore.
I'd like it for a hundred USD, but 200-250 is just doable. We're almost there. Don't spoil the good for the perfect.
"Company'll"? lol
I'm not going to be a hater on this... I actually think it looks "cool" and like the ipod style. However, I looked at the eStore and their pricing is all over the place... many books for about $20. C'mon...
Will you be able to buy books from amazon, or are kindle books protected only for the kindle reader?
If this thing supports Japanese, then I`m buying. That has been the biggest roadblock to picking up a Kindle. (That, and the high price, but I can deal with that for the coolness of owning a e-reader.)
I have far more things I would like to read that are not in English than things that are. Waiting for some sort of feasible but unannounced update to Kindle to allow it? Or buy something smaller, lighter, and that supports it from the box?
Not too difficult a choice, even if it does look like an iPod ripoff.
You have a legitimate gripe. It's not likely Kindle is going to support Japanese unless they work out a wireless distribution deal in Japan, and e-book deals with Japanese publishers and authors.
You have a solid reason for getting a different device. Frankly, I'm surprised there *aren't* any e-readers that support Japanese. I don't read Japanese, but I'd think there would be at least one out there that is made for the Japanese audience.
It wouldn`t be too much of a hassle to simply support Japanese fonts. It appears that it is merely a software limitation, which could be changed with an update patch.
Actually offering books in Japanese is another story, but I don`t see why they shouldn`t try for it. Amazon has a very strong presence in Japan and nearly everyone reads in some capacity (train commutes give most people ample time...)
Sony`s offering failed largely because of the very small number of books available, along with simply being ahead of it`s time.
The biggest problem is DISTRIBUTION.
I'm glad they kindly have copied the iPod design, but that's NOT what made iPod revolutionary (good design never hurts), the main revolution about iPod is the delivery system by the name of iTunes. Before iPod, people relied on encoding their own cd's, pirating them, etc. It was a ghetto process, that definitely didn't fit most people. Apple introduced a simple process to buy music (and yet it was open enough that if you wanted to put your own mp3's - YOU COULD). So these guys need to start a iBooks store. A device that looks like an iPod is not going to revolutionize the reading industry, device that comes with the distribution model like iPod MIGHT...
Amazon has done this, but they've done it in a such complex and closed manner that I think they've turned off many potential customers (ME, I'm not paying 10 cents/file to put my own files on my own device, AMAZON - THAT'S JUST IMMORAL).
What? It's free to transfer or convert&transfer any file to your Kindle.
It costs 10c only if you want Amazon to convert it and email it directly to your Kindle.
Actually, 15 cents per file, up to 1 megabyte (most books in straight text are about 700k).
But again, it's free if you just transfer a file over via USB cable, just as you do in the Sony (or in the Cool-er, which has no inline-dictionary, no search, no highlighting or notes and no wireless.
I do like the rotate on the true pdf though.
But $250 is too much for something that doesn't have all those basic features. I'd also like to see what their warranty is like.
I would be embarrassed to walk around with that.
Now this is what i've been looking for, I almost picked up a BeBook precisely because I wasn't interested in Amazon's lock-in program. And with Barnes & Noble relaunching their eBook store after snatching up Fictionwise it's a good time to be a bargain hunter. Not at the $99 eReader yet, but we are getting there.
I'd be interested in this if I didn't look like a moron with a gargantuan iPod carrying it around.
Why such low file format support? How about Doc and Lit and however many others there are? BeBook supports around 10-15 and costs the same.
thats a battery tester which looks nothing like it.
Perfect except that it has no integrated light. Give it some kind of edge lighting so I can read in the dark and I'll be all over this thing.
"no keyboard, text-to-speech, WiFi, or Whispernet equivalent"
Sounds perfect. I don't want to pay for junk I won't use, and I don't want too much propriety in my devices. Can someone do a side-by-side with Sony's 505?
But...
Will it blend?
That is the question...