Ereaders used to be fairly rare and expensive, but with more and more companies offering Ereaders to the consumer the market has been blown wide open. The Cooler eBook Reader is aiming to undercut the offerings from Sony and Amazon, offering a cheaper Ebook reading solution that will ideally appeal to the gadget hungry generation.

eBook Reader for the iPod Generation

Created by an entrepreneurial team in the UK after the ebook site they ran sold out of Sony Ereaders, the Cooler Reader is being marketed as the iPod of the Ereader world. It is perhaps no surprise then that the design of the Cooler Ereader borrows heavily from Apple’s own aesthetic history. Like the iPod Nano it is available in eight different colours, ranging from stylish Black to Racing Green and Cool Pink.
If you have a young student in your family then the design of the Cooler eBook Reader will appeal to them. Even the control interface is based on Apple’s click wheel scheme.
Luckily the Cooler Ereader manages to pay homage without producing something that feels like a rip off. It certainly looks like no other ebook reader on the market. It is also lighter and smaller than the competition from Amazon whilst still using the same screen technology to make the pages displayed look like real text in a printed book.

Available Colours

• Black Jack
• Silver Shine
• Ruby Red
• Blue Sky
• Cool Pink
• Vivid Violet
• Racing Green
• Hot Pink

Share your eBooks with Friends

The biggest selling point of the Cool-er Reader is the ability to share the titles which you download. With other Ebook stores you are restricted to purchasing a title and using it on a single Ebook reader. However, the Cooler Ereader allows you to share the books you buy with up to five friends. This is certainly a step in the right direction, addressing the criticisms leveled at the inflexibility of copyrighted Ebook material. Of course you will need to buy your books from the Cooler Reader’s own online book store, but the same applies to products offered by competitors in the field.

At the time of writing this review the sister company that supplies the ebooks for the Cooler Reader claimed that 1 million titles were available for download with around 500,000 of them being completely free.

Prices for the latest titles that were available at the Cooler Books Store were comparable with the competition in the UK with the added bonus that any one owning the Cool-er Reader would automatically receive a 25% lifetime discount on all downloads.

Cool-er Reader Supported File Types

• EPUB
• PDF
• FB2
• RTF, TXT & HTML
• PRC
• JPG
• MP3

Storage – Battery Life- Audio Books

The Cool-er Reader is capable of storing around 300 to 500 ebooks at any time on its internal 1GB memory. This can be expanded to 4GB by inserting an SD card.
Page turns from one charge have been estimated at around the 8000 mark.
As well as being more than capable of viewing most of the formats that are currently available to the ereader market the Cooler can also play Audio Books that can be downloaded from the Cooler Books store. An added feature is that this ebook reader will also play MP3 files so that you can listen to your favourite tracks whilst you read.

Cooler Issues

There are a few problems with the Cooler Reader which may put some people off.

The first is that though the design is attractive, the buttons which you use to turn the pages and interact with your collection of books are all rather stiff.
If you use it for extended periods, which any avid reader surely will, it may get on your nerves.

Also in terms of the software which powers the Cooler Ereader you get a basic package. You can read PDF files as well as Ebooks and you can change the size of the font, but there is a lack of intuitiveness to the design of the menus that makes the whole process more sluggish than it could have been.

Conclusion

Overall the Cooler Reader is a good beginners Ebook reader, but if it was given to a person who has never used an eReader before it might put them off the format quite quickly. It is constructed and designed to be a cheap alternative to the competition and as such lacks some of the premium features like wireless connectivity, but there are certain people who will be able to get the most out of the Cooler Ereader.

	Store	Delivery	Price
	Firebox	£3.95	£189.95