5

By Paul Biba

cool-er-image.jpgRoger Sperberg put me onto this. Here’s another e-ink reader. It looks fairly standard, but the price is $249 and it does EPUB, PDF and txt. I’ve asked the company for some more information and will report back when they reply. You can find them here. They also have an ebook store with “750,000 titles”. Are ebook readers already turning into commodity items? Wow, that was fast!

Update: Michael von Glahn sent me a link to this Financial Times article:

The Cool-er is the brainchild of Neil Jones, an avid reader and entrepreneur, whose company is based, appropriately, in Reading, in the UK.

Mr Jones says the device will have taken less than six months to develop from its conception in January to its planned availability in the first week of June.

The idea came after he began an online digital bookstore and had quickly sold out of a batch of Sony Reader devices. He realised there was demand for the e-readers but could not get Sony to guarantee supplies. He also thought he could improve on the design.

The result is the Cool-er and Coolerbooks.com, an online store for the US with 260,000 paid-for titles at launch from all the major publishers, compared to around 250,000 on Amazon. Around 60,000 titles will be available in the UK and Europe initially.

The Cool-er’s price of $249 in the US will undercut the Kindle by $110. At 5.65 ounces it is 40 per cent lighter than the Kindle and, having compared the two devices side-by-side, the Cool-er looks about half-an-inch shorter in length and width.

 
5