Review: Irex Iliad Book Edition ebook reader

Book publishers have so far escaped the kind of disruption IT caused to the music and film industries, and most seem to believe this will continue.

Even bookseller Borders, which sells this Iliad ebook reader, believes it will not dent print sales.

Yet traditional publishers cannot afford to be complacent. Print-to-order publication is becoming popular and technology capable of presenting a serious challenge to the printed book is gradually coming together.

Truly affordable portable computers are becoming available for the first time, but they’re hard on the eyes for prolonged reading and their battery life is limited. The Irex Iliad Book Edition is one of a number of new devices to address these limitations.

Its 8.1in 7,658x1,024-pixel epaper screen, which combines technologies from both Philips and US company E-Ink, is easier to use for prolonged reading than an LCD, but the nearest it gets to white is a light cardboard colour. This is not unpleasant, but makes for poor contrast, so you need to be in good light to read it.

On the other hand, it needs no backlight and so uses relatively little power. Irex’s estimate of a 15-hour battery life may be optimistic, but it will easily stand a full day’s use. The screen supports 16 shades of grey, but no colour.

The Iliad screen differs from similar ones on rival ebooks, such as the Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle, in having a stylus-driven digitiser layer from Wacom, which allows you to use it for navigation and handwritten notes. This is where its difference from paper is most marked – it’s not easy to write on and deletions often leave marks that disappear only when loading a new page.

Navigation using screen icons is sluggish and only slightly less so when you use the physical controls, so the Iliad seems a little underpowered. Boot-up takes 35 to 40 seconds, which is a long time for a device attempting to rival the convenience of a book.

Measuring 21.7x19.5x1.6cm, the Iliad is slimmer, but slightly wider, than a paperback with a rather austere aluminium-look casing. Along the top edge are slots for SD and Compact Flash cards, a USB port for linking to a PC, as well as a stylus slot. The bottom edge holds an audio jack (there are internal stereo speakers), an on-off switch and a multi-pin port into which you plug in the combined power and Ethernet lead.

Other controls are ranged round the screen. A button at the top-right takes you to the Irex download site, where you get free companion software for your PC, as well as ebooks for reading. This Book Edition includes 50 pre-loaded classic books, although these are all freely available titles.

Four buttons at the bottom of the screen provide quick access to stored newspapers, books, documents and the notebook utility. Left of the screen are up, down and select buttons, a scroll bar for turning pages, a menu button and a button for going up a menu level.

The Iliad works best with pages that are tailored for the screen. Reading an untailored PDF manual was very awkward: we had to zoom in to read the type, and when we got to bottom right of one two-column page, it was hard to navigate to the top left the next one.

The Iliad has the feel of a prototype, rather than a finished product. Nevertheless, it may interest people who travel a lot as it will allow them to carry a virtually limitless number of books and read them fairly comfortably. The screen, although impressive, shows that epaper has a long way to go if it is to rival the real thing, but there is no reason to suppose that it won’t do so.

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