Love the iLiad’s eight-inch screen but don’t want to pay some €650?
The silver “Book Edition,” on sale Friday, might be the answer.
It omits WiFi but comes loaded with 50 free English-language classics—in Mobi format?—and sells for €499. Among the titles are Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Pride and Prejudice and Dracula.
U.S. price question
Yes, I have questions. What does the €499 mean for U.S. consumers in practical terms?
The current iLiad goes for US$699. Will the Book Edition’s price be in the lower 500s? I’ve emailed iRex Technologies.
Helping out novices
I also wonder about iRex’s documentation, based on my experiences with the older model. In iRex’s place I’d offer a simple, colorful illustrated guide, going beyond a “QuickStart” card, and distribute it on paper.
Many novices want to focus on the information, as opposed to accustoming themselves to e-reading right off the bat. Especially I’d play up how to buy books, download Mobipocket Desktop (screenshot) and synch the main PC to the iLiad.
Remember—the wireless Kindle lets you download e-books in a blink; no need to synch or use a memory card. That’s what iRex must compete against. Gang, how do you feel? Remember, iRex wants nontechies to be among the Book Edition’s buyers. What works for you, as an e-connoisseur, might not work for many bibliophiles.
Praiseworthy commitment to many formats
On the positive, beyond that awesome screen, it’s great to see iRex offering the 50 preloaded books and aiming for a lower price.
Furthermore, I like iRex’s continuation of its commitment to a choice of formats. Now supported are “PDF, PRC (Mobipocket), HTML and TXT” and “support for additional E-book formats will become available over the coming months.”
Let’s hope that the IDPF’s ePUB standard will be added shortly, and that iRex will encourage its software partners to cut back on use of DRM, so people can own their books for real.
Titles available: iRex talks about 49,000 books in Mobiformat. The Kindle has 115,000 titles, though at least some of of these are newspapers and blogs, and the screen isn’t as large or readable in general as the iLiad’s is.
Links: Press release, specs
(Thanks to Wiebe de Jager at Ebookreaders.nl and MobileRead.)
With an 8 inch screen rather than the 6 inch of the Kindle and 16 shades of gray rather than 4 plus the higher resolution, things are going to look better on this Iliad. I have no argument with the lack of independence from a computer, but it will cost them some sales. I also don’t see much in the way of Macintosh support, other than the fact that one can transfer files. MobiReader doesn’t work on anything but Windows. Some people are going to love the touch screen, some are not. I have touch screen on my Palm T|X and I would not go out of my way to get that feature, although I might feel differently after using one. This new Iliad is sure to handle PDF better than the Kindle, especially with a larger screen and zoom ability.
David writes:
I just checked the web site for eReader Outfitters, iRex’s U.S. distributor and the company from which my wife and I bought our iLiads. No mention yet of the new model.
Al writes:
There is none, which is a real shame. When connected to a Mac via USB the iLiad appears as an external disk, and files may be installed using drag-and-drop between Finder windows. I keep a mirrored image of the Iliad’s file system on my Mac, add new books to the mirror, and use the UNIX rsync utility to sychronize the two file systems.
The sole advantage of the iLiad’s Wifi capabilities for Mac users is that its firmware can be updated without wiring it up to the Mac with the slightly kludgy connectivity kit. The lack of WiFi in the new model will be no great loss to Mac users.
If you type “499 euros in dollars” into Google then you get the message “499 Euros = 766.4141 U.S. dollars”. If the old price in dollars for the iLiad was $699 then consumers using dollars are already apparently obtaining a substantial price break.
Garson, that matches my conclusions, but let’s see what our European readers say. Correctly or not, I do recall people complaining about the subsidy of dollar-using buyers. If iRex can set up straight, so much the better. David