The Ebookwise 1150

I've been a HUGE fan of ebooks since 1999 when I bought my first Palm IIIe and found the peanutpress.com website. (Now owned by Fictionwise and called Ereader secure). Over the years I have bought over 300 books from various web stores, and converted a heck of a lot of fan fiction and been from Project Gutenberg.

I've always read on my PDA starting with the iiie, iiic, Tungsten T, Lifedrive, Treo 650, and Treo 755p.

If you look those models up you'll notice the screen has gotten smaller as time went
on, my eyes have also gotten older. Last week I started the hunt for a dedicated ebook
reader.

My first stop was amazon to have a look at the Kindle since that's the one getting
all the press right now. Unfortunately for Amazon I live in Canada and they only sell their
device in the US so I moved on.

Sonystyle. Now this was a reader that had some features and the price wasn't that
bad at all. I had pretty much decided to go with this one since the other e-ink readers
all had price tags that I just didn't want to deal with right now.

I then read the reviews of E-Ink and while most people love it, the one thing that bothered
me was the lack of a backlight (Or the lack of a free light for the reader, the backlight from
Sony is another $70.

Since I don't sleep my wife spoke up and told me I would need to find something that wouldn't
require a bedside lamp.

I started hunting for a LCD reader with a backlight, and stumbled across the www.ebookwise.com site which is owned by Fictionwise. I read the specs, and checked out the reviews online and even though this is seriously old tech people still LOVE them. I hauled out the old plastic and ordered one up.

The device got here in 3 business days, and was packaged very nice, the case it comes with
is functional and I can chuck my ebook in my briefcase with everything else and feel it won't
be damaged.

I promptly set everything up and registered the device and had access to my online bookshelf.
It asked me if I wanted to import all my previous fictionwise purchases (Multi format only) to
the new bookshelf and I let it.

I also picked up the librarian software from their website which allows one to use the USB cable
and "Online Bookshelf" to connect to your local computer where you can place your own created
books. With a bit of work I was able to remove the DRM and convert some of my previous .LIT and Mobipocket books into HTML and from HTML it was a breeze to convert to the IMP format.

The fonts are very easy to read and the brightness / contrast controls allow you to tweak it
to be viewable in almost any light. I went outside and in everything but DIRECT sunlight the
ebookwise is very readable.

The big buttons for changing pages are GREAT, and so is the touch screen for entering some
search terms. I also really appreciate the dictionary that comes with the device, as it is very
easy to highlight a work and look up the meaning. The device also lets you take notes on the
book directly on the page itself, if you need more room you can add a blank page and write or
draw until your hearts content. This will come in very handy!

While it's not been a long time yet, I think I will be happy with this device for a while to come.

www.ebookwise.com for more info.