Hanlin e-Reader

Ebooks have been around for a while, but haven’t captured the imagination.

That’s slowly changing, though ­– well-known shops carry them, and as well as all the worthy, out-of-copyright texts, current bestsellers are available too.

The Hanlin V3 e-Reader uses E-Ink technology, which gives a pale-grey background on which black text appears. It only uses power when the screen updates, so the battery is lightweight and will only need charging every 9,000 page turns.

The e-Reader has two buttons to the left of the screen for page turning, 10 numeric buttons below it, plus OK and Back. The 9 and 0 keys also turn pages, so you have a choice of where to grip. Pressing OK brings up a menu, with options depending on the type of book you’re reading, and some of the number keys have specific functions too, such as 8 to zoom, or 6 for bookmarks.

The screen’s easy to read, but the menus are quirky ­ with a Mobipocket format book, for instance, you have to press the menu key when reading the contents, 6 for ‘Follow link’ then type in the number of the link, and press OK. And while Mobipocket’s DRM is supported, so you can buy books from their store, Epub DRM system isn’t yet, although an update is promised. By way of comparison, Sony’s £224 PRS505 does support Epub DRM, but doesn’t support Mobipocket at all.

There’s a good range of other formats supported on the e-Reader, including HTML, CHM and PDF ­ but reading a PDF isn’t that elegant as the zoom levels are fixed, so you can’t scale easily to match the screen size. With a test file it was a choice of slightly too small, or only half a page at a time, and in landscape mode.

If the books you want are available in formats supported by the e-Reader, or you want to carry DRM-free material with you, this is well worth a look. But don’t throw out your book collection.