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It’s official: New Cybook will offer Mobipocket and improved E Ink in Sept.—with 50,000 titles available
July 26, 2007 | 2:10 pm
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By David Rothman
Bookeen‘s new Cybook will offer Mobipocket—in effect making more than 50,000 titles available, or far more more than the Sony Connect store now offers in its BBeB format. Nothing against Sony. This is just an illustration of what happens when eBabel prevails rather than a common standard, like the one on the way from the IDPF. The basic version of the machine is to sell for $350 and appear in September. Meanwhile here’s the official press release.
Paris, France – July 26, 2007 – Bookeen is proud to announce its new Generation 3 Cybook. Based on the latest groundbreaking Vizplex™ epaper technology from E Ink, this ebook reading device offers an impressive 6″ screen showing off a 166 dpi resolution.
Bookeen’s new product looks stunningly thin: it is the size of a paperback, the thickness of a magazine, for a weight of only 6.1 ounces (174 g). It boasts an impressive battery life of 8,000 page flips, allowing for an average reading time of 1 month without recharging.The device is compatible with all USB enabled computers, independently from the operating system (Windows, Mac, Linux…) and also offers an SD slot for virtually unlimited library storage space.
Concerning content availability, Bookeen also announces an agreement with Mobipocket, an Amazon company, to license and distribute the Mobipocket™ leading ebook format on the Cybook. The Mobipocket™ format offers access to a vast amount of copyrighted books ranging from bestselling Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” to the latest Hillary Clinton’s biography. There are currently about 50,000 titles from world’s leading publishers available from dozens of online ebook stores.
Following its original open and multi-format strategy, Bookeen offers a true freedom of use regarding supported documents formats. Cybook owners are free to read personal and public domain content. “On the Cybook, you don’t need to convert your files to an exotic format or upload them to any proprietary web site. You simply transfer your files directly to the device and read them natively” said Laurent Picard, co-founder of Bookeen.
Available in September from Bookeen store on the Web
The Cybook Gen3 has entered production and will be directly available next September from Bookeen online web store at bookeen.com, in different packs starting at $350. It will be the first product to include the new E Ink Vizplex™ technology, offering the brightest and fastest switching epaper display of the market.
“The screen is truly like a sheet of paper, it can be viewed from nearly any angle and in a wide range of lighting conditions, including direct sunlight” said Michael Dahan, co-manager of Bookeen. “The ebook industry will clearly reach another stage with the new Cybook.” Laurent Picard added: “Our ongoing partnership with Mobipocket is a great opportunity to bring their tremendous digital content to a new category of customers and to offer the most competitive device to the end user.”
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Comments:
This looks like the one for me!
I loved the earlier Cybook, Paul, but as we know tech marches on, and it’s great to see that Bookeen is still in the game. With Mobipocket expanding the number of books available, the Cybook would easily be worth the $50 more than the $300 that the Sony Reader commonly costs. I just hope that Cybook owners will enjoy access to as many Amazon.com titles as will owners of the Kindle machine; my belief is that they will. The improved screen is another argument for the Cybook.
Hey, I call ‘em as I see ‘em. It will be interesting to see what Sony offers in return, beyond the inevitable Vizplex technology.
Thanks, Paul, and we’ll look forward to your first impressions of your Cybook!
David
…and no apparent annotation capabilities (certainly no hint of a stylus for highlighting purposes).
But still a lot cheaper than an iLiad. Be interesting to see how the Cybook addresses the search isssue, of course. Thanks for your thoughts, Brian. I love it when readers jog me about points not mentioned. We want to provide the full picture. So far, however, as I see it, from afar, the Cybook looks very interesting. – David
Looks nice, nice size. Still I won’t consider a device that does not support annotation, search, and bookmarks. Underlining would be nice as well. All were available in the device that started this all, Nuvomedia Rocket eBook.
I can’t help feeling ergonomics suffer as well. It looks as if a rocker switch controls page turning and if that is so it does not look like a real natural action to me. Again the original eBook let the page buttons fall naturally under your hand and accommodated left and right handers.
It will be interesting to see how good the display is. This should be a good device for someone who just wants to read and is not concerned with making notes or searching for text.
As one who read quite a bit in the dark I am still looking for someone to figure a good lighting system for e-Ink
Dana
No backlighting? No sale! Heck, give me the old original CyBook, I was about to buy one when they pulled it, and for this?
Where are the designers these days that show that they actually have USED the products they design, and would actually buy their products at the prices they charge?
Image support is the bugaboo of both sony reader and mobipocket. I’d be curious about whether it displays images with the hirs attribute .
Looks interesting – but – why Mobipocket. Surely MS Reader is more widely used, and a failure to support PDF files and other imaging formats seems to me to rule the device out, despite the price and the toherwise attractive technical spec.
Hi, Richard. My guess is that Mobi at this point is far, far more popular than MS Reader, which is DRM at its worst, or at least close to it. Not every .lit book is DRMed. But big publishing houses tend to keep using the technology for now. As for PDF displaying on the new Cybook, I wouldn’t be surprised if it appeared there in time—although it might not be in the encrypted form that the big publishers like, alas. The old Cybook could read nonDRMed PDF. Thanks. David
P.S. While I don’t see PDF mentioned in the Cybook’s specs, others are talking as if it’s already on the machine. Maybe it is. I just don’t know for sure.
I’m totally with Dana on the annotation feature, but clearly the people making these devices don’t think that annotation is that important a feature. Maybe this isn’t something that many potential buyers of these devices care about.
As for Mobipocket vs. MS Reader. Mobipocket appears to be much more popular with far more titles available, and frankly it is a much better standard and easier to deal with (compare the awesome new Mobipocket Desktop package with MS Reader…not even close). It’d be interesting if Fictionwise would release data on purchases/downloads by file type.
More importantly, though, MS Reader *requires* Windows CE/Mobile/whatever. The Cybook is based on Linux.
I agree that MS-Reader doesn’t seem to have any energy behind it. Microsoft did something really great when they initially released the Reader macro for Word that let us create Reader-formatted eBooks for free and the MS-Reader for for the iPaqs was a nice product for its day. But it hasn’t been kept up to date.
Not sure MS-Reader is better or worse from a DRM perspective than Mobipocket. Both support it. But Mobi has worked hard at becoming a ubiquitous reading platform whereas Reader was really intended to help make the buy decision for Windows/Win-CE more compelling.
Still, I do have customers who prefer Reader. I have even more customers who prefer PDF–which makes no sense to me but I don’t argue with customers.
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com
Dave,
Like you, no backlighting (or some sort of lighting) is a deal breaker for me. As I understand it e Ink precludes backlighting, but maybe some sort of edge lighting could be done? And indeed the designers don’t seem to really thinking about how these readers are going to be used. A lot of thought went into the original Nuvomedia product from the reader’s viewpoint. I’m not sure if it has been done better.
The e Ink is a cool technology but I hope there are some developers out there that are still pursuing LCD displays. There is some new LCD technology out there with lower power requirements. Heck my old rocket can get over 20 hours of reading on a charge and the battery is over five years old I believe. Sharp once made some really nice “page white” LCDs with a very nice white backround. A newer version of this would make reading an LCD-based device pleasurable I think. I have reason to believe at least one e Reader developer is still looking at LCD for a reader.
Dana
I want to weigh in on the backlight issue! I used my palm pilot with its backlight and really do like that I can read in the dark with it. however, after getting the Sony reader I have discovered it is really not such a bad trade off. I can read outside as if it were an ordinary book , where as my palm pilot text is invisable out in bright light. But the main advantage to no backlight is the battery life . I often read for may hours a day. My palm pilot is good for maybe 5 hours and then needs several hours charge. The e-ink technology uses no power except to change pages so it only needs to be charged every 7,000-8,000 pages
I have been waiting patiently for this new version. The Mobipocket was a must for me since I download most of my books from the New York State Library web site. Those books that aren’t available I buy from Mobipocket.com or Ebooks.com. Give me an easy way to download in a format that’s available on the library site and I am more than happy to pay extra. I’ve had the original Cybook for 1.5 years and take it everywhere and use it constantly and best of all have had no problems. I’m really excited about this new version. I’m a senior and this is my window to the libraries.