Review Date October 08, 2010

Sharper Image Literati Reader

  • Pros

    Big, bright color LCD. Integrated Wi-Fi. Kobo application syncs with other devices.

  • Cons Sluggish navigation and page turns. D-pad is difficult to use. Short battery life. Heavy.
  • Bottom Line


By David Pierce

Along with tablets, ebook readers seem to be a segment every company wants a slice of. The Literati Reader ($159 list) is the Sharper Image's first foray into ereaders, and it's got some compelling features like a big, bright color screen, integrated Wi-Fi for on-the-go book buying, and the popular Kobo bookstore. Unfortunately, though, the Literati is far from bug-free, and the book-reading experience is too frustrating, so it's tough to recommend the Literati over the Editors' Choice Amazon Kindle 3G + Wi-Fi ($189, 4 stars).

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Design and Features
The Literati comes in two colors—glossy black and glossy white. The first thing you'll notice is that it's shaped differently than most ebook readers. On the front of the plastic case is a 7-inch screen, but it's a longer, thinner screen with a 16:9 height-to-width ratio, rather than the 4:3 you'd find on a Kindle or a Barnes and Nobles Nook ($199, 4 stars). The 16:9 ratio of the screen is one of my favorite features of the device, since the thinner screen means shorter lines, with more on a page. Below the screen is a full QWERTY keyboard, with a directional pad for navigation. The Literati measures 9.5-by-5-by-.5 inches (HWD) and weighs 12.6 ounces; it's taller, thicker, and heavier than the Kindle or the Nook, the two giants in the market—of course, the larger size gets you a 7-inch, rather than a 6-inch screen, so it's a tradeoff.

That 7-inch screen is, unlike the monochrome E Ink displays found on most ebook readers, a full-color LCD screen. It's attractive and bright—though not in an overpowering way. It's certainly not as easy to view for long periods as an E Ink screen, but thanks to a Night mode that inverts the color (white text on a black background), reading in the dark was much easier on the eyes with than with the Apple iPad ($499-$829, 4 stars). It's also more attractive than the gray-on-gray look you get with E Ink.

On top of the Literati are a Power button and a slot for a memory card. You get 512MB of internal storage, but to get more than a few books on the Literati, you'll want to use that memory card slot—the device supports up to 8GB cards. On the bottom of the device is a Mini-USB port for connecting the Literati to a computer to load books and documents, and a port for the included AC adapter. A soft, leathery case is included.

Switching the Literati on and off is an unexpectedly odd experience for an ebook reader. Turning it on is like booting a computer—it took 44 seconds for the Literati to turn on in my tests. Once it's on, a single tap on the Power button puts the device on standby, and another tap brings it back to life, while holding the Power button shuts it down completely. Leaving the Literati in standby makes the battery life a little shorter, which might be a problem—the Literati is rated at six hours of battery life, but that's a generous estimation. With Wi-Fi on, and with moderate use, I was only able to eke out about 4 hours of battery life. Compared with the Kindle, Nook, and many other competitors that last weeks on a charge, that's definitely something to consider. But in all fairness, you are getting a color LCD with the Literati.

You use the directional pad and QWERTY keyboard to navigate the Literati's menu system. The keyboard is usable as long as you type slowly and press firmly on each small key. There's no real purpose for the keyboard other than searching the store and entering Wi-Fi passwords. The D-pad, the primary navigational tool of the Literati, is almost unusable. The four directional buttons are tiny, and all are located next to the Back and Delete buttons, each of which I pressed repeatedly while trying to move the cursor. Anyone who doesn't have tiny fingers will likely have trouble pressing the right button, which is best achieved by using only your fingernail tip.

Turning pages causes similar problems. The Page Forward/Back controls are not actual buttons, but are rather touch-sensitive spots located on either side of the screen. Frequently, they didn't register when pressed. More often, presses wouldn't be recognized until several seconds later, and my represses resulted in unintentional multiple page flips. This is mostly a problem with image-heavy pages, though it happened much too frequently regardless. At its best, however, the Literati was faster to turn pages than the Kindle or the Sony Reader Pocket Edition ($179.99, 3 stars). But its performance was much less consistent than those devices. Overall, it seems like the Literati might not be powerful enough to handle its software.

When the page-turning worked correctly, the Literati provided a pleasant reading experience. When a book is open, there are no menus or extraneous information, like you'd find on the Kindle—it's just the page you're on, and nothing else. The Menu button allows you to skip around within a book, look up a word or choose something else to read, and a button with an oval icon at the bottom left of the device opens the menu to change font style, size, and screen brightness.

Other than reading, there's not a lot you can do with the Literati. There's no Web browser, or games, or image viewer. There are four tabs on the Main Menu: I'm Reading, which shows what books you currently have open, Books to browse your whole library, Docs for viewing files that aren't books (the Literati supports ePub, PDF, TXT and other formats), and a Store tab for buying books. The Kobo Store is actually one of the highlights of the Literati—it's large, with over 2 million titles, and has everything from periodicals to novels to cookbooks. Since the Kobo store is on so many devices now, syncing your reading progress with your other devices is easy with the Literati. If you're reading on the Literati, Kobo remembers your place in the book, and you can pick up where you left off in a Kobo app on any other platform, from PC and Mac to BlackBerry and iPhone.

Every Literati comes preloaded with 25 classic books, like The Call of the Wild and Anna Karenina, and you can easily download another 125 titles for free. These books are free anyway, since they're in the public domain, but I appreciated the simplicity of getting them on the Literati with just a couple of clicks.

Overall, I can see great potential in the Literati—the LCD adds color, brightness, and clarity without hurting your eyes (and you can read in the dark), and the hardware is generally solid. The software, on the other hand, doesn't seem fully baked. It's inconsistent, sometimes painfully slow, and too difficult to navigate using the D-pad. Also, unlike with an E Ink device, you'll have to charge the Literati every couple of days. There aren't many extra features to speak of, which would be fine if the reading experience were fast and reliable—and it just isn't. The company promises a software upgrade in the immediate future, and a big update in November and December that will both add features and fix bugs, but for now, in a world where the Kindle works exactly as advertised, and the Wi-Fi version is just $139, there's not really a good reason to spend more on the Literati—even if it does have the color screen.

More Ebook Reader Reviews:
•   Amazon Kindle Paperwhite (2013)
•   Barnes & Noble Nook GlowLight
•   Kobo Aura
•   Kobo Aura HD
•   Amazon Kindle (2012)
•  more

David Pierce
By David Pierce Junior Analyst, Consumer Electronics


Follow David Pierce Twitter: @piercedavid
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