“It arrived! Yes, the engineering samples from Bookeen, of their new Cybook Gen3 ebook reader, have arrived at NAEB LLC and I got my sample/review unit this morning! I’ve charged it up and I’ve taken a photo of it side-by-side with my Sony PRS-500. Both of these ebook readers use the 6″ e-Ink display from PVI Inc. but the Cybook uses the newer ‘Visplex’ version which has a somewhat brighter background.” – Derek Benner via Dr. Ellen Hage. Also check out MobileRead discussion.
The TeleRead take: This is great news. We can see that the perceived contrast is noticeably better than the Sony Reader’s. NAEB, by the way, stands for Not Another eBook, and the project came out of a Baen discussion group where people voiced frustration with existing hassles such as DRM and eBabel.
At the same time, I hope that the NAEB project will be practical and let people use at least one DRM-“capable” reader that can allow the reading of books from big publishers fixated on “protection.”
The forthcoming NAEB device is also notable for its multiformat approach, which I hope will include .epub in time (as long as the IDPF doesn’t let any one company predominate). Let the marketplace shake thing out. If the IDPF embraces the open source community and projects such as NAEB, it will contribute to the format’s adoption.
[…] we wait for the launch of Amazon’s Kindle, review copies have been mailed:NAEB Cybook sample: Favorable first reaction from blogger, impressed by brighter screen than Sony’… “It arrived! Yes, the engineering samples from Bookeen, of their new Cybook Gen3 ebook reader, […]
What will the advantage supposedly be of the NAEB reader over the plain old Cybook version?? From reading the info about the Cybook, it is supposed to support PDF, HTML, RTF, TXT and Mobipocket. … so is the NAEB version just Cybook minus Mobipocket??
This pictures looks like the Sony reader is turned to the left, away from the light. Look at text on teh Cybook, it’s lighter just like the background is. I think I straight edge or ruler along the front of both would’ve made sure they were both facing the light directly.
My biggest complaint is, the e-ink site has shown color e-ink since 2003!! why hasn’t it been released, I can just imagine reading archived comics on one!