Recently, I have read a lot of articles, and some of them on the cybook. I would have used the cybook even more if it wasn’t for two major drawbacks:

1. You can’t take notes, or highlight text!!!
2. The “table of contents” is awkward when the Cybook is filled with PDFs. It’s difficult to quickly navigate among articles.

The first drawback is a huge one. I’m a frequent user of the comment & markup tools in Adobe Acrobat, Skim etc. The really positive side has been the reading in front of a window with bright, clear winter light. It has been quite a few beautiful days lately and it’s nice not to being forced into a dark corner with the laptop.

[youtube=http://se.youtube.com/watch?v=bYhrpre7Sx4]

There is a big difference between the Cybook with or without the leather case. Without it, the Cybook feels kind of awkward to hold, but with the leather case, the feeling comes very close to reading an ordinary paperback book.

I just unpacked an E-book Reader,  Bookeen Cybook Gen3. Everything went smoothly. After a 3 hours battery charge, I just pressed the on-button and started to browse the included library. The included books were mostly demos, but one of the full books were Charles Stross’ Accelerando, which I happened to own as paper book. I’ll report about reading fiction later on, but I’ll mainly read research material, so the first thing I did after checking it out was to load it with the reading material for a doctoral course I’m currently taking.

The picture gives an idea of the size. For comparison, I’ve included a mobile phone, a Nokia N95. The Cybook is about the same size as a paperback book, but much thinner. It’s about half the depth of the N95.

As you can see in the picture, I have started to reed Bruno Latour’s article “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik – or How to Make Things Public“. The article is difficult to read on the website since it has some unclear, grayish text. The grey area on the Cybook text is from a digital text marker in the software Mobipocket. However, there is no need of going trough Mobipocket. You can just drop the pdf-file on the memory card, or a text file, or a html file. Enough for now, more on my reading experiences in subsequent posts.