So, I just bought the FoxIt eSlick reader

: Image by PiPiWa via Flickr

It was through giving the Ohpan beta a try that I discovered the FoxIt eSlick. I rated up a number of tech stories and through that jkOnTheRun‘s post about the eSlick potentially working with eReader caught my eye. I didn’t know FoxIt was working on hardware.

I’ve always loved ebooks and I’ve always loved eink or epaper. It combines the convenience and functionality of ebooks with the high readability of paper. Previously I had my eye on the Hanlin eReader V3 which has similar specs but a much weaker CPU. The eReader was the cheapest of the devices on MobileRead’s eInk devices matrix. I was wary of buying directly from the manufacturer because I didn’t expect much in the way of support. Enter FoxIt and their eSlick.

It has a six inch screen with 600×800 resolution. The picture quality is limited since it only supports “4-level gray scale” which I assume to mean four grays, rather than four bit grays (a total of sixteen shades.) Either way I expect images to be dithered terribly but simple graphs to look good. It reminds me of reading the news through AvantGo on my old Palm m105.

After a bit of research it seems to be a branding of the Neotronix EB-600. The specifications match up including the processor. The difference is FoxIt will be leveraging their fantastic reader since they already have a Linux version. It’s much faster and lighter than Acrobat and seems to run well on the limited Linux device judging by the video of the prototype.

Not only that, it comes with a professional version FoxIt Reader. I seem to have missed the introductory price of $229 since it’s now selling for $259. I decided to sleep on it, but before bed I’d ask if their educational discount applied to hardware as well as software.

Imagine my surprise when they responded to my email forty-three minutes later. Imagine my continued surprise when they agreed to give me the discount. Imagine my jaw dropping when they agreed to give me the 20% discount off the $259 preorder rate, rather than the $300 retail rate, bringing my cost down to $209. That’s the price of one textbook and it comes with a 2gb card, plus the aforementioned FoxIt Reader Pro.

Sold!

Update: Turns out it was a mistake. They do not offer academic discounts yet, which is partly why my eslick hasn’t shipped as of April 28th.

My unit is due to be shipped in two to three weeks, so I’ll have it within a month. By the end of March I’ll be well kitted out with my netbook and reader. Maybe it’ll make me eager to study. In the meantime I’m scoping out a sleeve for the eSlick. Bookeen sells one that looks like it’ll fit since their reader is also based on the EB-600, but costs more and has a CPU that’s half as powerful, and doesn’t have FoxIt Reader. Hey, look, I’m gloating about the gadget already.

More details about the eSlick are available from the FoxIt website.

Foxit takes eBooks to a new low with the eSlick (crunchgear.com)

13 Comments to “So, I just bought the FoxIt eSlick reader”

Gary 8 March 2009 at 5:16 am #

Hey, thanks for this post. Foxit told me they wouldn’t give an educational discount on the $229 price, which was fair enough, but it’s nice to know you got the discount on the $259. I’ll email them again, but did they apply this to your order at the order stage or did they just make a note of it for you?
lance 8 March 2009 at 3:26 pm #

@Gary,

They generated an order number for me and told me to pay $207.99. I’ve already paid that in full. You might try asking for Erik when going through sales, he was eager to help me when I posted about the price on the jkOnTheRun forums. Good luck!
Gary 9 March 2009 at 5:06 am #

Thanks Lance. I just took your advice and emailed sales to Erik’s attention – hopefully he’ll come through.
Gary 15 March 2009 at 6:26 am #

Hey Lance, just letting you know I contacted Erik and ended up ordering my eSlick a few days ago. I didn’t get a 20% discount, so you did well there, but Erik helped me out a little.
I just did a test, on the Feedbooks website, of downloading a Gutenberg text and a Creative Commons licenced text as custom pdfs. It generates these on the fly. I set up a 92mm x 122mm screen size with 11px (sic) Palatino font with 5mm of whitespace all around and it looks lovely. I’m looking forward to seeing how good it looks on the eSlick. I’ll probably play with GutenMark and Calibre too.
lance 15 March 2009 at 6:40 am #

Hi Gary,

Glad you got a discount but sorry to hear you didn’t get the same deal.

I gave Feedbooks a try and I think I’m likely to continue using it to convert my blogroll to PDFs. GutenMark I’ve used for a while and I’ve been very happy with. Calibre looks great as a library manager but unfortunately the converter doesn’t output to PDF. The author is on MobileRead and appears pretty approachable, I might put in a feature request.

Hope you get some good use out of the eSlick, I’d love to hear any tips you come up with!
Gary 15 March 2009 at 8:37 am #

OK, here’s a tip. Do you use LaTeX? If you do, you can use the pdfpages package to strip whitespace from around the text in an existing pdf document. Say you have a pdf with a large blank marginspace around the text. The following LaTeX file will make a new version. Unfortunately, it will lose any bookmarks, links etc. I usually run it with pages={-8} to process just a few pages, tweaking the offset and scale values until it’s stripping out the bits I want, then change back to pages={-} or maybe a different page range to strip out any guff you don’t want. It’ll also let you glue together multiple pdfs into one file.

\documentclass[a5paper,oneside]{book}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\begin{document}
\pagestyle{empty}
\includepdf[pages={-},offset=0mm -5mm,scale=1.3,pagecommand={}]{“pdf_file_name”}
\end{document}
Grace 23 March 2009 at 11:49 am #

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Please visit our website http://www.kindle-2.org/reasons-why-you-should-buy-kindle-2
Pascal Forget 24 April 2009 at 9:42 pm #

Hello! After some delays, I got an email from sales last week, telling me that the units were going to be shipped early this week… Anybody received their unit? Today is April 24…
lance_ 24 April 2009 at 11:07 pm #

Hey Pascal,

They just finished shipping the last of the second round of US preorders. A couple Canadians have had their orders shipped but not mine yet.

The first few of the second round have already arrived. A couple reviews are filtering in on the foxit forums, I like this one in particular.

You can bet I’m going to be reviewing mine once I get it, especially checking how well it does on complicated research paper PDFs.
Case Larsen 14 July 2009 at 12:53 am #

I just received the latest shipment of the eSlick reader. I had purchased (and returned) the amazon Kindle version 1 18 months ago. Couldn’t accept the DRM restrictions.

I think ebook readers are still in early stages, like where laptops were in 1993, but I’m going to be an early adopter.
lance_ 14 July 2009 at 5:37 am #

Hi Case,

I’m a little surprised you returned the Kindle. Yeah, the DRM sucks, but it’s the cheapest way to buy books and you can strip the DRM.

That’s a good analogy. The eSlick still feels like an early adopter device because they haven’t added epub support yet. That’s the biggest reason I don’t recommend it to my friends. Once the new firmware comes out, that’s another story.
Erik 26 July 2009 at 12:30 am #

Good news, I’ve tested the new firmware for epub and eReader(which now has 700,000 titles on Barnes and Noble). It should be ready in about 2-3 weeks for the public.
lance_ 27 July 2009 at 2:28 pm #

Hi Erik,

Fantastic! Thanks for the news! Looking forward to it.