Skepticism conitnues to surround Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader, launched last November and heralded as a radical, game-changing re-invention of the book. Now New York’s Ectaco, best known for building handheld language translators has decided to enter the electronic reader business with its jetBook. The jetBook features a 5-inch grayscale display, integrated bi-lingual dictionaries and multilingual support, an integrated MP3 player for listening to music and audio books, and an SD slot for loading content.
"The new jetBook now makes it possible to carry around a complete library—from novels to technical documents, even children’s books and poetry," said Ectaco CEO and preside David Lubinitsky, ina statement. "This completely amazing device lets you sit down and read more comfortably than ever before. It really is the book of the future and fully eco-friendly. Not a single tree was cut down to make it!"
The jetBook weighs in at just 7 ounces and features an English language dictionary arnd bilingual Russian-English and Polish-English dictionaries to users can look up and translate terms on the fly as they’re reading. Users can control the display’s text size and font, and Ectaco says the display is readable to almost 180 degrees. The device runs off an integrated lithium-polymer battery.
What’s missing here—besides technical information on what sort of document formats the jetBook supports—is the most obvious thing: books. We’re assuming the jetBook can handle the ASCII content in (say) the texts available via Project Gutenberg, but what about Word documents and PDFs? What about audio books, and the various DRM-protected formats used to distribute them? When Amazon launched its Kindle reader, it had distribution deals in place with major publishers to bring (ahem) top-shelf content to the Kindle immediately. Ectaco doesn’t seem to have any sort of distribution deals to bring content to the jetBook, noting only that "thousands of books can be downloaded for free." Given the translation options available for the jetBook, we’re guessing Ectaco is targeting the Russian and eastern European markets…and, of course, would encourage its users to download only legally distributed material that doesn’t infringe on copyright, rather than rely on torrents, file sharing services, and even Usenet to download "thousands" of titles..
Ectaco is offering the jetBook reader for $349.95; it is apparently available now.
