Cool-er ebooks adds another 400,000 books from OverDrive

Now that the UK has the Kindle, you are apt to forget the alternative from Interead, the Cool-er ebook reader, that was introduced this spring. Granted Kindle and Sony get all the distribution, because well they can deliver product in volume, but Cool-er is also a good and prettier choice as it comes in different colors and is format agnostic. Today the company announced a deal to add books from OverDrive which boasts 400,000 books in 42 languages, bringing the total avaialable for the Cool-er book reader to over 2 million.

The Cool-er is available everywhere and can be bought for $249 at the company’s web site. The reader supports 42 ereader formats including EPUB, TXT, JPEG and PDF, and weighs 6.3 ounces (less than a paperback) and its dimensions are 7.2 inches by 6.4 by 0.43, certainly easy for slipping into a bag. Compare this to a small Kindle at 8 x 5.3 x 0.36 (and $259). They say the screen can also be read in direct sunlight like the Kindle.

Now other than a slight price advantage there are two other things to like about this reader. One is that it comes in 8 colors; red, blue, hot pink, violet, light pink, green, black and silver so you already are piquing some interest out there. Secondly, every book you purchase you can share among five other people. Very iTunes like don’t ya think? So if you are a voracious consumer of romance novels you can pass them on to Aunt Sally or the rest of the book club, we are talking the educated consumer here. They also say this reader works with English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Russian, and Traditional & Simplified Chinese.

It includes 1GB of storage and has a slot to add up to 4 GB more. The Kindle comes with a fixed 2GB. You can even add audio books and music to this thing. The rechargeable and removable battery lasts 3 hours. I did notice that price of books are slightly higher than Amazon Kindle books but if you find a shopping/reading buddy to split the cost with I think that won’t matter much. The big difference is that you need to go and get the books from the web site via download rather than the secret magic Sprint network that delivers Amazon content. But keep in mind the book sharing and the fact it comes in hot pink, your book club might just want to place a order at http://www.coolerbooks.com/