Franklin EB-500 Rocket eBook

Other products by Franklin Electronics

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 1.5 x 5 inches ; 1.4 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 4 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B00000JSFS
• Item model number: EB-500
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes
• Date first available at Amazon.com: July 29, 1999

Product Description

Amazon.com Review

The Rocket eBook fits in the palm of your hand and stores the equivalent of 10 novels. Why fuss with bulky paperbacks on your travels when you can download them through the Internet and then read them at your convenience?

Some electronics manufactures have sought to replace the paperback novel with an electronic reader. The concept is simple: Create a handled computing device that can store the text of several books and thus negate the need to buy the physical books. The execution is not simple: Printed books are so perfectly well suited for their intended task that no battery-operated, LCD-sporting device can compete with them. Still, the Franklin Rocket eBook presents a worthy and fun alternative to the printed medium, if not a replacement. You control the unit with three buttons and four icons on its touch-sensitive screen, which let you select a stored title, navigate the title's chapters and pages, and decide how you want to display them (horizontally or vertically or for left or right-handed holding).

The Rocket eBook comes with its owner's manual, the Random House Webster's Concise Dictionary, and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland built-in. To purchase more books, you must install the included RocketLibrarian software and register the Rocket eBook online. In our tests, the process of acquainting ourselves with the device, installing the software, and registering the Rocket eBook online took about 45 minutes.

Using a provider of RocketEdition-compatible titles on the Internet, we located and purchased Daniel Brown's Digital Fortress in about five minutes, and we downloaded it in about two minutes. Transferring the book from our PC to the Rocket eBook took only 30 seconds.

For casual reading, even at only 22 ounces, the unit seems heavy after holding it for a few minutes--much heavier than a normal paperback. The unit's arrow keys let you page forward and backward, but not as rapidly as you can "thumb" through dozens of pages in a paperback. Also, you have to "pan" to see graphic images that are too large to fit on the LCD screen. Overall, the Rocket eBook's reading experience is not as pleasant as we've come to expect from reading an ordinary paperback. Still, if you want to read your favorite books but don't want to carry them in stacks as you travel, the Rocket eBook offers a great alternative--the ability to store several titles in a convenient, compact, portable package. --Mike Brown

Pros:

• Relatively lightweight
• Large storage capacity

Cons:

• Limited rapid scrolling (thumbing through pages)
• Limited number of titles available

Product Description

Electronic hand held reader. Downloads books and periodicals from the web to a pc then directly to this compact electronic book (5x7x1). Highly readable display, easy bookmarking and mark-up capabilities and navigation, touch screen control, search and find, adjustable page orientation plus automatic shutdown and preferance storage.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

82 of 82 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I love it, January 1, 2000

By A Customer

THE BAD STUFF: It's heavy. I sometimes flip pages when I don't mean to (although that it just because I always keep my thumb on the button). The screen shows fingerprints and it's really difficult to wipe off, about as hard as getting PAM off a pan. It's thicker than I expected (and one half is thicker than the other). The text is a little grainy. THE GOOD STUFF: It does everything I could dream of. It let me put my ENTIRE family tree (over 1,300 webpages) on it so I can take it to the National Archives. It let me make a collection of essays to put on it. There are thousands of books to download FREE. The backlight is fantastic. The text is changable. The thing holds about 100 books (mine has the 32 mg upgrade, which I recommend). The battery charges swiftly. The thing takes about five minutes to install and set up. The touch screen is awesome, especially when you use the pen. Allergo, the handwriting-recognizing software, actually works. The dictionary is handy, since you can set it up to touch one button, then touch a word to get the definition. I love the feature that lets you search the whole book for a term. I love carrying around Josephus and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle along with everything else I want to read. CONCLUSION: I love it.

102 of 104 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars This thing is great!, November 9, 1999

By A Customer

I've had a Rocket eBook since they were first available and canpersonally attest to the fact that most of the negative informationposted about this product is flat out wrong. The 22 oz. device is a library, not "just a book". What else would you call something that lets you carry around 100 books? The idea of carrying around a bunch of flash cards is old world thinking. I can download to my Rocket at will, so why would I spend a bunch of money on flash cards that I could easily lose? Yeah, sending the Rocket in to get the memory upgrade was a bummer, but last time I checked, it was 9 day turn around, not 3 or 4 weeks. I'd love to know where you can get 80mb of flash for well under a hundred dollars. Every on-line source I've seen wants $100 or more for 48mb. And if you think you have a problem if your son deletes titles from your ebook, what about when one of those expensive flash cards disappears?

To imply that the Rocket's designers didn't think about human factors flies in the face of reality. Compared to other handhelds out there, the Rocket is way up there on the ergonomics scale. Maybe they could have done more, but they clearly spent more than a couple of hours on the task.

The Rocket isn't perfect. At 22 oz., it's still too heavy, the proprietary memory is a pain, and a USB interface would be cool. I'm sure that next generation ebooks will improve on a lot of things. Find someone who has one and play with it, and you'll see what I mean! You'll be logging back onto Amazon to get one for yourself soon after.

49 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If You Can Find It, Buy It!, June 12, 2001

By	Jack Z (Berkeley, CA USA) - See all my reviews

I love my eBook! When I travel, I sometimes have 40 titles in it, and never run out of things to read. I especially love the way I can download free books from the Gutenberg Project and other public domain sites and load them into the reader. I can download HTML pages, and portions of web sites and have them to read. The backlit screen is very easy to read and requires no external light. You can adjust the light to accomodate a dark room or direct sunlight. I collect web pages and e-mail I've not read yet and upload them to the book. I have bought a few current titles from booksellers, with no shipping and immediate delivery too. Now the downside: It's so easy to get lots of good literature free that authors and book sellers are missing out on a cut of the profits. After all, if you want to read Mark Twain, why pay for a copy when it's all over the Internet, free? So they've stopped making this wonderful gadget, and the replacements from RCA actively discourage you from loading your own materials into the ebook. You can still find the software to do it, but you need to search for it. They also keep the prices very high,...for an ebook! I think this means the format is being driven out of the market slowly. This could eventually limit new, non-public domain book availability, but there will be thousands more freely available books too, plus all the reading you normally do on your computer screen, such as this web page. It will continue to be possible to use the ebook for that. Unless they come up with a PDA with a large, very readable backlit screen, with long-life batteries and highly ergonomic usability, it'll still be easier to read a Rocket ebook!