I’ve always looked enviously at ebook readers in airports: where a posh but expensive Sony model normally sits in a duty-free store, looking exciting. I’ve normally picked one up, played for a few seconds, and then put one down.

But, the right planets have aligned. While Amazon has insisted on its own closed, proprietary, system, requiring a similarly closed Kindle reader, many other bookstores, like Waterstones as an example, have embraced the comparatively open ePub format. Further, ebooks are available in PDF format, as well as text; and in terms of hardware, the cost of memory has come down and we’ve standardised (except Sony) on SD cards. The clincher for me was seeing the large amount of classic books that are downloadable on Google Books: of which more in a minute.

I’m not new to the idea of reading books on-screen. I read the first Harry Potter on a Windows Mobile phone (a pirated copy in HTML format); and earlier still, I read a Terry Pratchett on a Palm V. (This, too, was pirated, though I purchased the book later). But the BeBook Mini is a different thing to either a Palm V’s black-and-white LCD screen, or the glowing screen of a mobile phone; it’s a proper eBook reader, with proper ‘paper’ screen; and it makes a massive difference.

First, there is no chance of this thing running out of power while on a long journey. The battery is only used when changing the display: and lasts for allegedly 7,000 page turns. If it takes 30 seconds to read a page, that’s 58 hours non-stop of reading before you’d need to charge it – that’s longer than any non-stop flight, and, indeed, longer than a round-the-world flight even if you include refuelling stops. That’s five times longer than the iPad, which couldn’t cope with a trip to Los Angeles.

The BeBook Mini appears to cope with almost any format available out there, excepting books destined for the Amazon Kindle or the Apple iPad. It also copes with DRM’d books in PDF and ePub format. This means that books are plentiful to find; assuming publishers are enlightened enough to make their product available in an electronic format. Indeed, even if not, the books seem easy to find – on my bookshelf is the Larsson book “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” – a three minute Google search discovered the same book, in ePub format, as a free download. (Hey – I’ve bought the content already. I’m not doing the Larsson estate out of any money.)

But the most wonderful part of this was the discovery that Google Books offers PDF downloads of original book scans. So, if you want to download Jack London’s Call of the Wild, for example, you can download it as a PDF which looks like the original book – scribbles in the margin, nicely uneven printing artifacts, and the original plates at the beginning and the end. You can see the effect at the top of the page: a properly old-feeling experience, rather than computer-generated text. And I love it.

These large PDFs do take a while to turn the page (four seconds or so) instead of the almost instant page-turn from a text format, like an ePub. But it’s well worth getting into: you can almost smell the musty pages and feel the yellowing paper. The screen is splendidly clear, and reading a book on this device is a nice experience – probably the most obvious difference is that if you leave a page ‘open’, the unit will never time out to conserve battery power. It’s like a book.

The unit itself is plastic with a soft-feel covering (it looks and feels like it should be made of rubber). It has no less than three different places to turn the page – large left/right buttons on the left, smaller left-right buttons in the number keys at the bottom, and an inset rocker switch in the right-hand side. Depending how you hold the unit, you’ll probably end up using all of them to turn the pages.

It comes with an SD card slot (it takes SD cards up to two gig); a USB cable to charge the unit (a fairly standard mini USB connection); and a pair of headphones – the unit plays MP3 and, I think, also speaks the books to you if you’re lazy, not that I’ve tried either. The SD card, which takes precedence when you plug it in, means that adding new books is easy – just pull the SD card out and stick it into the computer. Accordingly, this works just fine on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Bugs? There are some. First, it’s almost impossible (on a Mac) to eject the unit correctly after transferring a book. This results in the thing resetting itself (and forgetting the time/date that you can pointlessly set), and lots of error messages on the Mac. Use an SD card, and you’ll be fine.

Second, eject an SD card, and the unit forgets where you were on the book. I think the way to fix this is to press the ‘back’ button to return to the ‘bookshelf’ before you pull the SD card out. It’s a bit frustrating.

But frankly, these are tiny bugs in an otherwise excellent product. It’s small – smaller than the paperback it replaces – and seems to cope with a sensible amount of files. The official website also has updated official firmware, unofficial firmware builds (haven’t tried, doubt I will), and a thriving community of users: always a good sight.

You probably won’t go far wrong if, if you’re looking for an ebook reader, you choose this one. It doesn’t do much; but that’s the point.

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