My First Impressions

[screenreader]

Hi!

I received my Cybook Gen3 yesterday (deluxe pack), and I've been testing it for a day and a half to let you know my impressions. I hope they are useful for the people out there who are still unsure... you may be still unsure after you read this!

I´ll just say in advance that I had never ever seen or touched a e-reader before.

To make this an easy read, I'll talk about its good things and bad things. Also sorry for possible typos, my english is not as good as it used to be.

Thumbs up:

-The Screen: I had never seen before an e-ink screen "in real life". The sharpness, details, even the gray scaling is absolutely over my expectations.
-Ease of use: I find the 4 direction-button suitable for all that's needed, although in a future update I hope folder navigation is performed like in a cellular phone, I man: right to enter the folder, left to exit, etc. This button nearly makes all the others go unnoticed and even unnecesary.
-Mobipocket and html formats. This was beyond my expectations. I hadn't thought how a simple html text, with almost no editing, could be read so easily and quickly.



Thumbs down:

-Incredibly cheap feel. Plastic, buttons, sd card, earphones. It's somewhat disappointing when you think of the overall price. The leather case is the only thing that makes it look or feel price-worthy.
-Navigation system. Is a pain you-know-where to deal with covers. I hope soon that update everybody talks about when a folder navigation system is implemented. I'd add to this a line-by-line (sort of excel data sheet appearance) to sort author, title and all that. I personally don't see the "covers" system useful, specially when you want to have a full library there.
-Pdf and manga. Maybe this is my fault, and not cybook's but I bought the device mainly for reading pdfs (specially manga), and it's real hard to make it work properly. It's way too slow and lots of pages even don't show. I'll open a thread asking for help, so don't count this as a totally negative issue yet.
-The SD card included. After an evening of cutting, copying and pasting in the sd card included, something went wrong. The card became like corrupt, and was unaccesable by windows, and I had to format it twice, thus deleting all my libraries, and having to copy them again. Again, maybe it was my fault, but this never happened to me with cameras and similar devices using sd cards.

So in a nutshell, I am satisfied with its overall features, but still feel that the software included could work far better, and that pdf support should be better.

My advice for buyers is: wait for the firmware update and let's see how much navigation, pdf use and overall speed are enhanced.

Hope it was useful.

Cheers.

[HarryT]

The Gen3 is basically a device for reading novels - something which it does very well indeed.

The problems with displaying PDFs are very well-documented, and very well-known. PDF is not an eBook format, and was never intended to BE an eBook format. It is the worst possible choice of format for an eBook. There is no good way of displaying an A4/US Letter sized page on a screen 1/6th the size of A4/Letter. There's just no way around that fundamental limitation.

The only eBook reader which will display PDFs at all well is the iLiad, which is about double the price of the Gen3, thanks to its larger screen.

[ggendel]

I have a lot of PDFs as well. I think you can make them a bit more readable by cropping off the margins for the Gen 3 (I have Acrobat which does this with ease). Unfortunately I can't test this because I'm on the NAEB waiting list at the moment.

As I understand it, the best eink reader for PDFs is the Iliad but even that has some issues (and it's pricey).

[tompe]

Originally Posted by screenreader

-The SD card included. After an evening of cutting, copying and pasting in the sd card included, something went wrong. The card became like corrupt, and was unaccesable by windows, and I had to format it twice, thus deleting all my libraries, and having to copy them again. Again, maybe it was my fault, but this never happened to me with cameras and similar devices using sd cards.

I wonder why so many people seems to have these kind of problems. Did you "eject" or do "safely remove hardware" or "umount" before removing the cable? Maybe the operating system in the Cybook is buffering more data than other devices so this becomes more of an issue under Windows?

Under Linux you definitely are going to get a corrupt filesystem if you forget to unmount.

[screenreader]

Thank you, HarryT , ggendel and Tompe!!

I never intended to read A4 sized pdfs. But the average tankoubon (manga volume) is quite similar to the reader's screen, way smaller than even an A5 (half an A4) so size shouldn't be a problem.

About pdf problems being well-known, maybe it should be a good thing that Booken stated this in their website. When I was thinking of buying the device, I just saw "PDF supported" and no notice of known issues or problems with the format. Thus, not acknowledging this problems in their very website is somewhat deceiving, at least from my point of view.

It's not a nice surprise to notice this once I purchased the device. As a customer, I shouldn't have to navigate forums to know these kind of problems, if they are well known by the developer itself.

About page cropping, I tried, and works reasonably well, but my real problem is why some pdfs are readable and others not. Size? Number of pages? jpeg compression?

About the SD Card, yes, I definitely "safely removed hardware" before removing the cable. I perfomer all this operations from an external card reader, not through the Cybook. Hope this helps.

Thank you again for your answers and your concern.

[astra]

Originally Posted by screenreader

About pdf problems being well-known, maybe it should be a good thing that Booken stated this in their website. When I was thinking of buying the device, I just saw "PDF supported" and no notice of known issues or problems with the format. Thus, not acknowledging this problems in their very website is somewhat deceiving, at least from my point of view.

It's not a nice surprise to notice this once I purchased the device. As a customer, I shouldn't have to navigate forums to know these kind of problems, if they are well known by the developer itself.

Well, this one is indeed a well known problem in 6" eInk world
Sony has done just the same. Many people bought it because they saw: Supported formats: ....PDF....Although the reality proved to be very different. So, it is not only CyBook's problem (if it makes you feel any better )