Decided to see if i would like using one. There were two goals - it had to be inexpensive and non-proprietary, which certainly ruled out the Kindle and the iPad. I purchased the Aluratek Libre pro (in white), a small and cheap e-book reader. It has an SD card slot and a usb connector - important for easy copying and it supports PDF, TXT, FB2, ePub, MOBI, PRC, and RTF files. Unfortunately it's screen is not e-ink but lcd but for less than $100 what do you expect? The device did get a favorable review in the Globe & Mail.
First step was to upgrade the firmware. We downloaded and unzipped the folder, connected the usb cable and started copying the folder to the SD card. It ran for a while and then we got an error message about '..too deep' or something and then Windows explorer froze up. We unplugged the SD card and killed explorer. This fixed that problem. We were now able to reconnect to the device's 128mb internal memory which has 4 folders:
- Pictures
- Books
- Audiobooks
- adobe-digital-editions
Since the display is black and white i'm not sure why you would put pictures on it! The audiobooks folder would be useful - it can store mp3 songs or real audio books. I'll transfer some of my audio books and check it out. Copying files to and from the device is very slow, very slow indeed. Be prepared to wait. It took 5 minutes to copy the first chapter of A Scandal in Bohemia. I decided to set up some copy operations and go for lunch...Copying Richard Dawkins caused windows explorer to freeze again (divine retribution perhaps?). I decide to restart windows and move the device to an osx and a ubuntu machine for testing the copying.
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