The long evolution of e-readers moves one step closer to a breakthrough product with Bookeen’s newest Cybook, popularly known as the Cybook Gen3. The Cybook offers an interesting and innovative interactive viewing screen that is admirably slim, light, and powerful. Despite a slick design, virtually unlimited storage, and easy-to-use controls, the Cybook’s screen ultimately falls slightly short of the mark.

At 6.1 ounces and measuring just 0.4 inches thick, the Cybook weighs ounces less and is fractions of an inch smaller (in depth) than Sony’s PRS-505 and other e-readers. It feels good in the hand, and flipping pages with the four-way navigation control quickly becomes second nature. When placed inside the optional black leather case, the package increases its modest heft to 11 ounces, less than the weight of a trade paperback book.

Under the skin, the Cybook Gen3 has a Samsung ARM-based processor and runs an efficient version of Linux. On the outside, the Cybook has a 6-inch E Ink VizPlex screen. With 800- x 600-pixel resolution, it matches the display on the Sony PRS-505 e-reader but can only show four shades of gray compared to the PRS-505’s eight. Plus, while the words show up on-screen as solid black characters, the background is a mottled field of light blue instead of white. Like the PRS-505, the Cybook lacks an internal screen light, which can make reading in bed a chore.

The Cybook has 64MB of storage available for on-board e-book storage (one third the capacity of the PRS-505), but its SD card slot means it can hold quite a library; an SD card with 1GB capacity can hold hundreds of volumes. The same USB cable that’s used for transferring books also charges the device. Unfortunately, the Cybook doesn’t have a wireless option for downloading books, which Amazon’s Kindle e-reader can do.

The Cybook covers the document support territory well with its ability to display Palm’s PDB and PRC formats, text and HTML files, and Adobe Acrobat PDF (Portable Document Format) files. Oddly, though, the device doesn’t support Adobe’s eBook format. The Cybook can render JPG images, play DRM-free MP3 audio files, and display TrueType fonts, while letting you bookmark where you leave off and switch between portrait and landscape modes. On the downside, you can’t annotate material, and it can take nearly 30 seconds to start the device and open to the page where you left off.

An e-reader is worthless without content, and the Cybook works with scads of e-book sources, including Mobipocket Reader Desktop (see the “Books Sans Paper & Ink” sidebar). Over the course of two weeks of daily use, the device’s lithium polymer battery was more than enough for reading “Moby Dick,” which has more than 1,000 pages in its electronic edition.

Clearly a work in progress, the $350 Cybook Gen3 has a delete button that doesn’t work correctly and often the controls need to be hit twice to work. Still, the Cybook gets us one more tantalizing step closer to replacing paper and ink with silicon, glass, and plastic.

by Brian Nadel