Bookeen Cybook Odyssey HD Frontlight review

The Bookeen store prices its books in Euros and most of them are in French, so you’ll probably do the majority of your eBook shopping elsewhere and then transfer them to the reader. This is simple to do. When you connect the reader to your PC, it appears as a mass storage device to which you can simply drag DRM-free eBooks. If you want to read any EPUB titles that use Adobe Digital Editions DRM, you’ll need to download and authorise the Digital Editions desktop application from Adobe. You’ll then be able to use it to transfer books to the Odyssey.

The reader can also handle PDF, HTML, TXT and FB2 document formats. We were pleased to find that PDFs loaded quickly and were neatly zoomed to the correct size for the display. You can manually control their zoom ratio, too. The reader’s menu also provides you with the usual options to look up dictionary definitions, annotate books and, in the case of EPUB and similar eBook formats, change your font size, family and other text style settings.

The issue we experienced with the reader’s uncooperative orientation detection doesn’t happen very often, but it’s still annoying. We were also unimpressed by Bookeen’s choice of a capacitive touchscreen rather than an optical touchscreen which can be used while wearing gloves or with a stylus. This is a perfectly adequate reader if you want to be able to view your eBooks in the dark, but it’s worth noting that the excellent Amazon Kindle Paperwhite is cheaper.