First impressions: Interead Cooler and iRiver Story e-book readers

Among the e-book readers scheduled to hit the market soon in the US are at least two–the Interead Cooler, $249, and the iRiver Story, $279–that cost about the same as the Kindle (which costs $259), and sport a screen of the same size (6 inches) and technology (E Ink). But based on trying out these two devices at the recent Consumer Electronics Show, only the Cooler offers a compelling reason to consider it over Amazon's dominant reader, or possibly over other upcoming e-book readers, including upcoming multipurpose tablets such as the Apple iPad.

That distinction: The Cooler is very light, an enormous advantage for a product category that's all about mobility. At about 6.3 ounces, it's about 40 percent lighter than the Kindle and nearly half the weight of the Barnes and Noble Nook.

Interead Cooler
Source: Interead

I wasn't able to reliably judge the speed of its page turns or its ergonomics. But I did like its unique control for font size. Where most e-book readers require several button presses to make type bigger or smaller, the Cooler allows it in one push of a small rocker control on its side; the control resembles the volume control on an iPhone. Another nice, quirky touch: The Cooler comes preloaded with Sudoku games. And where almost all readers are white or black, it comes in eight different colors, including two shades of pink.

To me, the iRiver device lacked any such elan. And its page-turning performance was unimpressive, proving to be slower than the Kindle and some other competitors I saw at CES. Reps for iRiver, a company known primarily for its MP3 players, talked about an interesting vision of having the device become a platform for social networking, with e-book bookworms sharing insights about their reading via their Storys. But that's seemingly only a vision for now, a possibility for the 2.0 version of the device.

The Cooler and Story share one key disadvantage. Both must be connected to a computer to get content; there's no 3G connection for content–as with the Kindle, Nook, Sony Daily Reader, and other devices–though versions of both that have at least Wi-Fi capability are promised.

We expect to have further coverage of e-book readers, likely including these models, as they hit the market over the months to come.

–Paul Reynolds