A glimpse in a future when paper-made books are only found in museums

In case you've read the first volume from Frank Herbert's “Dune” series and in case you first read it in the 90's like I did, you might remember the scene where Paul reads some sort of video book before the spaceship reaches Arrakis and you might have thought: “Man! Books with a screen instead of actual pages! How cool is that?"

Well, eBooks have been a normal part if our routine technical environment for quite a while now, but only when read from a special E-book reader such as that provided by Pixelar can someone truly get that “electronic book” feel. And it's much more comfortable and practical than reading books at your desktop computer, or even on a notebook.

The Pixelar e-Reader weighs only 220g, battery and all (as much as the average old-tech book), has roughly the same dimensions (84mm (l) x 120mm (w) x 9.9mm (h)), and a 600 x 800 (6 inch diagonal) E-Ink technology display. The image imitates the papery look and you can read it even in bright sunlight.

We're dealing with an open format e-book reader here, which means it's compatible with a very wide range of file formats: PDF, MOBI, DOC, WOLF, MP3, HTML, TXT, CHM, FB2, Djvu, PNG, TIF, GIF, BMP, JPG, PPT, EPUB, LIT, PRC. In case you're wondering what's the MP3 format doing in this kind of list, you should know that Pixelar's mobile reading device can also play music while you're reading. If the font-size of some e-book or other is not to your liking, you can increase or decrease it as you wish (you have three levels available).

And in terms of storage capacity, this e-Reader is quite capable of swallowing an entire library with room to spare (512 Mb internal memory and 1GB SD card included – which can be expanded to 4GB). Unfortunately, the price for the basic package (219.99 pounds sterling) may seem too high for many users who already got used to reading ebooks from their computers.

We are just a few, but there are many of you, Softpedia users, out there. That's why we thought it would be a good idea to create an email address for you to help us a little in finding gadgets we missed. Interesting links are bound to be posted with recognition going mainly to those who submit. The address is