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Overview

The Bebook Club S is the latest edition to the electronic reader offerings by the Netherlands-based manufacturer. This edition is actually their expansion on popular Club unit that faced critical success in Europe thanks to its low price point. The new electronic reader provides users with new features but doesn’t have Wi-Fi and other options.

Hardware

The device has a 6-inch E Ink pearl display with a 600*800 resolution and 16 levels of grayscale. This edition doesn’t have touch screen, and navigation is performed with the D-Pad and manual page turn buttons. In addition, there are physical buttons allowing you to access the settings menu – those are different, each depending on which app or book you are reading. The Bebook Club S is quite fast thanks to the 800 MHZ Marvel CPU Processor. Most devices of this kind today launch with 400 to 500 MHZ, which makes them suffer while users are trying to open books or navigate around the interface. That’s why Club S is regarded as one of the quickest electronic readers these days.

The reader has 2GB of internal storage for the books and songs, and this can be expanded up to 32GB through the SD Card slot. As for battery life, it is quite solid with about a month of reading, and it needs only 3 hours to fully recharge. However, the device doesn’t have any LED or battery indicator showing that the device is powered off or is being charged. Do not forget to charge the reader up with a USB wall charger for 3-6 hours right after purchase before powering it on.

You can find a Mini USB port on the bottom of the reader, which is used for charging and facilitating a data connection to the PC to transfer content. In addition, there are also volume controls for the 3.5 mm headphone jack that allows listening to audiobooks and music. Moreover, the power button is for some reason also located on the bottom of the device, though many users are more used to it being on the top. Thus, the bottom actually is where all of the ports are, while you won’t find anything on the top or sides of the reader.

The hardware of the device is mainly solid, applications open fast and the ereader is very responsive. Although there’s no web or Wi-Fi, there are a lot of people who want to purchase electronic readers to just read.

Software

The device is running on the Linux OS, common for the most E-Ink based devices. The homescreen is quite minimal, displaying the library, SD card, shortcuts, documents, settings and apps. Those are very sparsely populated and may appear a turnoff if you expect lots of them – they are limited to a calendar, clock and calculator only. Another main option is self-explanatory – both SD card and documents have the same structure and simply show what is there on the SD card. Clicking on them or shortcuts will automatically open the app.

As for the Settings menu, it is quite deep and extensive. Bebook Club S allows the consumer to associate various programs bundled on the device to open up various ebook formats! In other words, you are free to make this device use FB Reader, Cool Reader or the default PDF reader for all formats it is directly supporting. Each of them provides you with the unique options to edit things like font, style, and many more! For example, FB Reader offers 18 different fonts to choose from, including Adobe, San Serif, and Courier. It also offers 23 different font sizes with previews of how the text will look after applying them.

Another way this ereader shines is that it is completely compliant with Adobe Digital Editions. You are able to easily shop with other stores if their books are in EPUB format, and directly load the media on the ereader while it is connected with your computer through the mini-USB cable. If you connect Bebook Club S with your personal computer with the device turned on, you’ll be able to allow the reader to act as an external memory.

Wrap-up

The reader in question feels very lightweight, so it will be easy and convenient to hold it in your hands over a long period of time. Indeed, Bebook Club S is just a dedicated electronic reader and doesn’t actually allow you to do anything else other then listening to music. For some reason, the default application to play the music isn’t even in the main menu – instead, it is buried in the settings menu during the book reading or in your library, which is quite weird.

Usually, when new devices appear on the market, they are always compared to the well-known products of Amazon or Barnes and Noble. Today consumers are getting used to devices offered at the price of $100, offering a full touch screen experience and allowing you to connect to the web and purchase books directly to the device. This way, it’s getting very hard for small firms to compete with the giants because of added costs to manufacturing and distribution.

Since the Bebook Club S doesn’t have touch screen or Wi-Fi, this may be a significant drawback for some, but the device still shines in areas the others do not. Users looking for a device allowing the maximum of creative control to change the apps dedicated to opening the electronic books like FB Reader, Cool Reader and PDF reader can be sure that it’s a right choice for them. Usually, PDF newspapers and comic books look really awful on a 6-inch screen, but this one provides the user with so much flexibility and control that they look rather solid. It’s really good to not be locked into a single ecosystem, but be able to do business with other ebook shops.

The drawback of the device is that it doesn’t have Internet browser and Wi-Fi that may turn some consumers off. In fact, there’re only 3 apps which aren’t even used by many consumers. Today you can find this device at $129 at the main Bebook site. In addition, shipping international is usually about $30. All in all, Bebook Club S is a great device for people who are already tired with page turns flickering every page and want maximum creative control in their reading experience.