Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Auslegung]

Does anyone know? If you've seen some, what brand? I'm really interested in the Sony PRS 505.

[bassexpander]

Samsung is just coming out with one. Saw a news article on it. You can buy downloads from Kyobo books... not sure about English, though.

[Trevor]

These are competitive at 300K. They are in Seoul. You can stop by their offices or they will ship it to you. English was okay when I emailed them.

http://nuutbook.co.kr/

[abiandjamesinsk]

amazon have loads, or you can also find them at the boarders web site. I have just bought one for my mother in the UK and it cost about $150.00 + postage. You can now get the books on the torrent sites for them as well. The Sony one is good as it has a big screen.

[Auslegung]

Thanks for the speedy replies. bassexpander, thanks for the idea, but I have already checked out the Samsung one and it sucks because it costs about $270, but there are only 2,500 books available for download through kyobo. I'll say that again...2,500 books. That's pathetic. Also, for that price you don't get any connectivity via wifi or cell phone.

abiandjamesinsk, I'd rather not do amazon because I'd have to ship it to a friend in America, then pay the outlandish cost of shipping it here. That could add $50-100 more to the price. What is boarders? Do you mean borders? I could find no ebook readers on their website.

I'll check out that nuutbook. Hopefully the site is in English, or I can find specs on amazon or something.

[crianp]

I emailed nuutbook but they never got back to me, I am up for heading to their offices if anyone is interested this weekend?

[Auslegung]

Yeah, I'd be willing to go. Sunday later afternoon would be best for me, but anytime Sat or Sun would work.

[Trevor]

Also, before you buy, educate yourself on your options for buying books as well as...ummm....not buying books. There's a treasury of stuff floating around online. I generally get PDF's for my Sony reader and convert them to Word, and then transfer them to the reader. Also, your options depend on what sort of reading material you like. If you like Sci/fi, then boy, are you in luck.

All readers that I am aware of can accept Word/text format. It is important to understand what kind of files you can load and how to format them. Sony reads PDF but the display sucks, so you are better off converting them. I have no idea about the Samsung.

[Auslegung]

Thanks for the advice, Trevor. I am one of the most research-prone individuals I've ever met, however. If it costs more than $40, I'm likely to spend hours and hours researching, and if it gets expensive ($150 or more), I'll probably spend weeks reading, researching and discussing it.

That's the reason I won't be buying a Kindle anytime soon. That's the single most creepy application of DRM I have EVER seen, and I'll be damned if I buy it.

[Auslegung]

I called Nuutbook today and they're out of stock, but said I could come by and test one out. I intend to do that tomorrow at 2pm. I went by Kyobo bookstore to check out the new Samsung SNE 50k (previously called the Papyrus) and it, too, was out of stock. I did get to play with a test model, however. There was only one book loaded onto the thing, it was in Korean, and I don't know what format it was in, so everything I have to say are based on that single book. Here're my impressions.

First, there's no expandable memory option, and it's internal memory is only 512MB, only 400 of which is usable. That's still a lot of books, but I've got a couple of gigs and it would be nice to have it all available at once. That sounds kinda selfish or something, but oh well.

It takes the page about 1.5 seconds to change. I kept hearing that the page "takes a while" to change, or refresh, and wantd some useful data, so I timed it 5-10 times, and every time was roughly the same, close enough that human error was probably the differing factor. 1.5 seconds does seem a little long, but I tried to mentally compare it to physically turning the page on a book and it's not much different. Plus, once you get used to that 1.5 second lag, you could hit the button a couple of words early and not have any page turn time.

The display seemed crisp enough, I've read complaints that some readers don't have enough contrast between the color of the background and the color of the text. I imagine I could read it for just as long as a physical book.

There were 5 different font sizes to choose from, the smallest one seemed about the size of a smaller paperback, while the largest one was the size of large-print books. The overall size of the machine was a little smaller than I'd prefer. It has a 5-inch screen, but I think a 6-inch would be ideal. The Kindle has a 6-inch, and I think the Sony does, too. I'm not sure about the Nuutbook. The Samsung actually felt heavy, but that's probably because it was so small. The Sony would probably feel lighter because it's bigger.

The Samsung is a touchscreen that comes with a stylus. You can write memos and do calendar functions. I don't know if you could write notes in the text, I didn't check. Nothing seemed to indicate that, so if I had to guess I'd say no, but it would only make sense to add that feature so maybe, idk.

As you're using the stylus while not reading a book, there are different things you can do like change the lines on the paper to blank, grid, dots, etc, you can change the width of the pencil stroke and other things, but the buttons to make the changes are not labeled so you have to guess at first until you begin to memorize them.

It's getting late and my memory is getting fuzzy about everything else, but for me, I'd rather have the Sony or Nuutbook. I don't care about a touchscreen, and I don't like how small it is. There's no external memory option, and there's no 3.5mm standard headphone jack, only the mini-usb connector that requires a headphone adapter to listen to music (I don't remember if it does music, so that may be a moot point). It is rather minimalistic, with the only buttons on the machine being the power button on the top right, and below the screen are three touch-activated (i.e. not physical buttons, just part of the machine you touch) buttons: back, forward, and bookmark. If you like the stylus interface and the smaller profile, you may like it.

[Auslegung]

I got a chance yesterday to toy with the Nuutbook and here is my review. Short and sweet, I think it's better than the Samsung, it's larger, supports more formats, displays pdfs great, allows for lefties to flip the display, has wifi (only used for newspaper/magazine subscriptions, unfortunately), and the company seems concerned about customer satisfaction, being significantly smaller than Samsung. I'm still trying to find out if the Sony PRS is available on the army base, and hopefully I'll be able to toy with it before the Nuutbook comes back in stock in a week or two and compare, but right now I'd be satisfied with the Nuutbook.

Here are some pictures of it: http://picasaweb.google.com/jmphry/Nuutbook#, along with this: http://image2.aving.net/2009/07/18/20090718163543483.jpg

The screen of the Nuutbook is 6" I was told, and it does look bigger than the 5" Samsung SNE-50k. It is also larger in every dimension, and since the Samsung felt too small to me, the Nuutbook feels just right. It even gets fatter on the right side (or if you're a lefty and change the display, on the left side) which allows for a more comfortable hold. Any way you hold the device, it is very unlikely that you're going to accidentally press any buttons. It was almost annoying because I had to constantly look for the two buttons on the top right of the device (or top left if you're a lefty), but those buttons aren't pushed regularly and once you get used to where they are, could probably be pressed in the dark. The unit comes with a cover for an additional W15,000, but it comes in only one color: light blue. I don't like the idea of a cover because it just makes the item bigger, and the Nuutbook is about as big as I want it and no bigger, but a cover does protect so I'll probably opt for one.

The main menu lists News, Books, Pictures, MP3s, and System. News would be newspapers/magazines which can be updated daily with the built-in wifi. Unfortunately, there is no other purpose for the wifi (no wikipedia, for instance), and is therefore useless to me, but others, I'm sure, will need it. In Pictures, the Nuutbook can display, in b&w, all the pictures that are loaded onto your machine via magazines, newspapers, and, presumably, books. The Nuutbook can play MP3s through two speakers on the back of the unit, or through the 3.5mm headphone jack. I did not get to test the quality of the MP3 playback, either through headphones or the speakers, but my guess is that the speakers sound tinny. In System, you can change some options, but none that I found useful. For instance, I did not find an option to refresh the display every X amount of pages, like the Samsung SNE-50K can. However, I did see less ghosting of the previous image with the Nuutbook than I did the Samsung, which makes me believe it isn't as necessary. Most options you'll be tinkering with will be while reading, and those are context-specific that show up on the miniature display at the bottom.

Within the Books category, all your books are displayed (obviously). They can be sorted according to author and date. I assume "date" means when you loaded them onto your machine, allowing you to see the most recent books, but I didn't think to test the feature. If you want to read books that are on an SD card, you must turn the reader off first, insert the card, then power it back on (or, as I did it, insert card, power off, power on). Then, when you select Books, the books that are loaded onto the unit's memory will be displayed, as well as the books from the SD card. They are all alphabetized together, but if the book comes from your SD, it says so beneath the title.

In addition to the two buttons in the photographs are the buttons you can see in pictures on the internet. Above the miniature display at the bottom, shown in the link, there are 5 nubs. Depending on the context, there will be 4-5 different things on the screen above, and touching (not pressing) the nub below it will select the option. The options are usually to do with the text: "link," "bookmark," "zoom" (4-5 levels, rendered very nicely on the couple of pdfs I put on it), "landscape/portrait view," etc. There are also back and forward buttons, the ones in the gray area of the Nuutbook in the link, and beside those, barely visible in the link, are up, select/ok, and down. The power button is on the top of the unit, above the gray area.

In the miniature display at the bottom, there is a battery indicator with only there bars, which doesn't mean much with one bar left, because that could be 1-1500 page turns left. I wasn't able to drain the battery in my brief usage, but perhaps it blinks when it gets really low, I hope. There is also a loading indicator, which is nice since eBook readers aren't always completely snappy, and sometimes you wonder if the button you pressed did anything. Since the unit has wifi, I would also assume that a wifi indicator would be displayed there, but again I didn't get the chance to test that feature.

The three pictures show all the connecting options on the unit and the side buttons, including 3.5mm headphone, SD, 24-pin for charging with your cell phone charger, and both USB and mini USB for transfer and charging. The two buttons are multi-purpose. The one with a plus on it brings up options, or when held goes to the home menu. The other button goes to the previous screen, and if held it rotates the display 180 degrees so it can be used more easily by left-handers. That, while useless to me, is my favorite part of the thing, haha.

This brings us to links. If the file you're viewing is formatted properly, either ePub or pdf (I wasn't able to get it to work on a text file, more on that later), and your text has notes, then the Nuutbook can select them and go straight to the link. For instance, if you're reading James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," which is loaded with notes in the back, you can hit the "link" button, select which note with the up and down arrows, press ok, and the Nuutbook will "turn" the page to the notes section. Selecting the same link from the notes page will "turn" the page back to where you were reading.

There is also a "table" option, which is like "links" but deals with the table of contents. Because the button is named a vague "table," I suspect it may have other applications if your file requires it, but none of mine did. To test this feature, I had a compendium of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series that, together, contain nearly 500 chapters. I was able to quickly and easily scroll through all of them, and when selected, the Nuutbook took me right to the correct page. However, my copy of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged did not fare so well. Pressing "table" did nothing. I suspect this has as much, or more, to do with the file than the reader.

The "bookmark" feature adds a bookmark to the page you're viewing, and allows you to quickly turn back to that page later. This would be helpful if your book doesn't have links, but you need to refer to maps or other things on a regular basis. You don't have to bookmark where you left off, however, because after you shut down the device and power it on later, it remembers where you were in any given book.

To test out the formats the Nuutbook is compatible with (txt, pdf, ePub, and their proprietary NZN), I brought books that had been converted from html and doc to txt and pdf. The Nuutbook displayed the pdfs great, but the txt ones didn't fare so well. One file I had converted from html to text displayed on the first 2 pages of 9, and had one or two formatting problems (quotes displayed as question marks, for instance). However, it did display the picture from the beginning of the text, which I was surprised about. Since the html-->pdf worked fine, I just won't convert things to txt. The one native txt document I had with me was a copy of Victor Hugo's Les Mis. As one of the largest novels ever, it's a large document, even as txt. It was 3mb, and when the Nuutbook tried to display it, the screen said, "txt documents over 1mb not supported." That shouldn't be a problem most of the time, since txt uses next to no memory, but because of this I was unable to test how the unit handles txt.

The Nuutbook is compatible with ePub, which is becoming a common format that sellers use if they don't want to use proprietary software. It is also what google books uses, and I would assume those display just fine. Currently, google books has about 1 million free titles, which means your library just got a lot bigger. It would be nice if the wifi capability allowed you to view those books on the go; perhaps that will be in a future incarnation of the device.

The woman I spoke to assured me there are frequent firmware updates, sometimes weekly. She also mentioned that you are notified by email when they are available. She did not mention (and I did not ask) how they are loaded onto the machine. I would hope it's through the wifi, but you may need to download it to your computer and then upload it to your device. She also mentioned that the first time you connect your machine to your computer, it will require you to download some Adobe reader thing. This will probably require a Windows computer, and since I primarily use Linux will be a little inconvenient for me. However, afterwards she said all you have to do is drag-and-drop, just like an external harddrive. I wasn't clear if the Adobe download is required to display pdfs, or has some other function, but it may be possible to simply load books onto an SD card, pop them in the device, and never connect it to your computer.

I was told the battery would last for 7k-8k page turns, but on the website it says Page View:
7,000 Pages (15Sec)
3,500 Pages (30Sec)
2,500 Pages (1Min)
I have no idea what that means, since sustaining the display doesn't require any electricity, and the more often you turn the page the more it drains the battery. What the webpage says seems counter-intuitive.

[GreenlightmeansGO]

You say the Nuutbook can display PDFs well...I just want to know if you can zoom into the image, as most PDFs are formatted to be viewed as A4 (well, mine anyway) or at least bigger than the display. If you are unable to zoom in, it might make reading the PDF difficult, no?

What exactly does ePub entail? I've never really encountered something in ePub format...although its very possible I'm mistaken.

[Auslegung]

You can zoom in. It had either 5 or 4 levels of zoom on the pdfs. Level 1 would be small text in a small paperback, while 4/5 is large font for seeing-impaired folk. I think the Nuutbook usually has 5 levels of zoom, but on one document (maybe a txt) it only had 4 levels, which was still quite enough.

ePub, according to the woman I spoke to at length, is becoming the default format for publishers who don't want to make a proprietary format. Maybe it'll get popular enough and pdfs will stop being the MP3s of the ebook world.

You can google epub and find out more, I don't know much about it. Here's the first two paragraphs from wikipedia, which may or may not contradict what the woman told me:

[theeyebright]

these might be worth waiting a few weeks for, especially if you want something a bit cheaper:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/05/technology/personaltech/05sony.html

[GreenlightmeansGO]

Thanks.