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:

It lacks wireless.

The thing I love about Kindle is its built-in wireless bookstore, based on a pretty fast cellular connection dubbed Whispernet. You can search, sample and ultimately buy and download a book on the fly, in less than a minute. Cool-er lacks wireless. You must connect a USB cable to transfer e-books from a PC or Mac, or load files from an SD card. It's not nearly as convenient or easy.

I ran into snags getting an Adobe e-book version of Dan Brown's Angels & Demons onto the Cool-er; Interead says it's a known issue that will be fixed with a prelaunch "firmware" upgrade that was unavailable in time for this review.

Incidentally, you use a USB cable to charge Cool-er's battery. The company says a single charge will last about 8,000 page turns — about equal to reading War and Peace five times.

Finding books.

Interead has created its own online store called Coolerbooks.com, which the company says has about 320,000 books now, on the way to a million or so.

Unfortunately, you won't find a lot of bargains, at least on best sellers. Elmore Leonard's Road Dogs costs $21.59 at Coolerbooks, John Sandford's Wicked Prey $22.36. Both cost $9.99 in the Kindle Store.

Cooler does match Kindle's $7.99 price on Angels & Demons (now out on paperback). Cool-er supports the ePub e-book standard (which Amazon doesn't) along with the TXT, JPEG and PDF formats. You can read your own documents on the device.

Clumsy navigation.

Cool-er takes a minimalist view on buttons and controls, which isn't a bad thing. You turn pages by clicking a click wheel on the right corner of the device. But you have to press with some authority, which I found annoying. Pressing one of the four side buttons on the left edge of the reader changes the screen orientation from portrait to landscape mode, a nice feature. But any comparisons to the iPod quickly end the moment you peek at Cool-er's pedestrian software interface. Bopping around menus is a chore.

As with other readers, you can bookmark pages, change the size of fonts and resume reading from where you left off. But Cool-er lacks the ability to annotate text, look up the meaning of a word or read speech out loud. It does come with a few extras. You can listen to MP3s or play Sudoku.

Cool-er supports e-books in eight languages: English, of course, plus French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and traditional and simple Chinese.

Cool-er is worth taking a look at because of its light weight and attractive price. But in most other respects, it's no match for the Kindle.

E-mail: ebaig@usatoday.com