eBookwise 1150 review

9/2007 UPDATE: My next attempt at a portable electronic book reader will be an iPhone or iPod. Progress is being made in that area.

Aw, man, I thought you were going to buy a Sony Librie!
Yeah, I was, but if I had that kind of scratch hanging around I’d blow it on a ticket to JPN and soapland girls, not techie bullshit.

Soapland girls?
Never mind. I would have copped the Librie, but it’s such a pain to get files over to the device and look it’s a compromise: someone is going to come out with an eink device that behaves like external storage or better yet an iPod. In English. That costs $299. So anyway, because I’m cheap and a L0W-REZ CYBERPUNK @heart I bought a

Fictionwise eBookwise 1150
It cost me $107 new off eBay and I like it. It’s like something out of my late-80s William Gibson phase. 10 megs of internal memory! oh man how am I ever going to fill that!

In twenty seconds, that’s how
And then you need a SmartMedia card which is a DEAD DEAD FORMAT and will cost you $35 for 128 megs. You also need $15 for eBookwise Librarian, which is cool because it’s decent software. Windows software. Doing all this on a Mac would not be fun. (There are caveats. Each book you transfer needs individual attention; you need to enter author and title and genre information even if your files are named “authorlastname, firstname - bookname.txt” in a folder called ‘fiction.’ The batch import didn’t work, for me. RTFs made the import puke. PDFs aren’t supported; you need to use Acrobat to export to txt or Trapeze or something.)

Summary
The resolution is comically low although not as bad as some other devices, the backlight is beautiful, the price is right, the weight is good, the battery life (all day) is good, and you can throw it out with no tears when something better comes along.

Yeah but what about the feel and smell and resolution of paper! what about etc.
Here’s how I’m mostly using this thing: I read books on paper then store digital copies on the eBookwise and store the paper copies in boxes and then the back of the car and then my storage shed in back of my parents house. This makes me feel like a world champion. And whatever the downs, the major advantage of any digital book thing is that you can SEARCH.

But: you don’t want the shitty translation of Crime and Punishment from Gutenberg
No, you want the Pevear and Volokhonsky. Which is fine because you’re not getting rid of all of your books, you’re just storing the ones you don’t read but keep around anyway because you’re neurotic.

Should I get one, then?
If the usage pattern above sounds good, yes. If you want a cure for paper books, no. If you want to read in the sun ever, no. If you want to drag text files onto an icon and expect them to just work on your device, no.

What’s next?
You’d think an eink device with wifi sync that read txt and pdf and lit with a gig of internal flash would be logical. You might also be waiting until Q1 2008, is my guess.

I take what I can get!