Aluratek e-book reader, the Libre, hands-on

The Libre isn’t the first e-book reader that I have reviewed, and I must admit that I have reviewed few of them. I didn’t find the Libre from Aluratek to be different from the last one that I reviewed.

Then again, last year brought about more e-readers than I think the general public really wanted, as most were only turning to Amazon’s Kindle to satisfy their e-reading needs. I suppose that this will be the year of the tablet and its derivatives.

But I digress. I will discuss what the Libre does that is different. According to the company, the Libre’s 5 inch black and white screen has “the same appearance and readibility” of printed paper. Since it has no backlight, it is just like reading a book. I think that most other e-book readers can do that, actually.

I do like the way that the Libre wants the first-time e-book user to get reading. It is made to be set up to get an easy Internet connection so you can download many free titles from ebook sites from googlebooks.com and gutenberg.org. The Libre also comes with a 2GB SD Card with 100 titles on it. You can see a complete list here.

The battery life is good for 24 hours worth of reading, and it can also do music files. No big surprise there, as for the support of BMP, JPG, GIF, MP3, and animated GIF picture format. I do like the page turning controller on the left hand side, which feels a little like turning the pages of a real book.

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