Interead's Cool-er e-book reader is cool, but it's no Kindle

— -- Almost everybody loves an underdog. Still, it's a monumental leap of faith to suggest that a small fry has much of a chance at toppling the Goliath of the electronic reader market, Amazon.com.

The upstart is an outfit called Interead, which this week starts shipping a svelte, lightweight and snazzy-looking new e-book reader called the Cool-er.

E-book machines had been around for a decade or so before Amazon's Kindles and Sony's Readers brought buzz and legitimacy. If anything, the market promises to get even bigger. Large companies (Fujitsu, Samsung) and small ones (Plastic Logic, iRex) have or will enter the market.

The chief appeal of e-readers, of course, is that you can schlep hundreds of books in a slab about the size of a paperback. But there's nothing light about their prices — $299 for the Sony Reader; $359 for the first Kindle and its successor, Kindle 2; $489 for soon-to-arrive larger-screen Kindle DX.

Price is the first place Interead intends to attack. The $249 Cool-er uses similar black-and-white E Ink technology as its rivals. All of these devices, Cool-er included, do a fine job of replicating the paper experience on an electronic screen. At first, you can't help thinking, "I'm reading an e-book." But if the book's any good, you'll soon forget that and get immersed in the story.

The Cool-er beats the Kindle on style, at least on the surface. It comes in eight colors: hot pink, racing green and the ruby model I tested, among them. The fact that these bring to mind colorful iPod Nanos is no accident. Cool-er creator Neil Jones says his goal was to create an "iPod moment" for e-books.

At just over 6 ounces, Cool-er is about 40% lighter than Kindle 2. Its 6-inch display is the same size as the Kindle 2. It has 1 gigabyte of memory for storing hundreds of books, half the memory of Kindle 2. But it comes with a slot for an SD memory card to bolster storage, which Kindle doesn't have.

After all that, you'd think the Cool-er might be an easy choice over better-known Kindle. It is not. Here's why: