Franklin EBM-901 eBookman (Metallic Black)

I love my ebookman. I can take it anywhere and I have never had a problem with it. Most people are curious and ask what it is...they roll there eyes at me because i am a book-a-holic. This is not for me as bulky as the Kindle looks like...you can put a code in to keep people out. It gives you a calculator...to do list...voice recorder...just handy things to use.

I had purchased this mainly because of the price and the fact that Franklin promised the ability to read Microsoft Reader format would be made available. A promise that was not kept. Mobipocket format and html formats could be read only and at that time there were not many books by known authors being brought out in those two formats. The battery life was very low and when the battery ran down you lost all of your content which meant you had to go thru the irritating process of downloading the operating system and contents all over again - which got very old very quickly. Installing batteries was not easy because if you didn't do it quickly enough, the device was wiped clean and you had to go thru the downloading of the operating system AGAIN. There were too many times that I was in the middle of reading a book and had to change the batteries only to have the device wiped clean - which meant I had to wait until I got back home in order to reload the operating system. The device was very small and the print was hard to read. If you used the backlight it ran the battery down faster - which from what I stated above you definitely didn't want to have happen. Within a short period the wheel used to page up or down broke and I had to order another device which entailed reloading the operating system and content. Franklin website does not even offer the ebookman anymore and refers you to another online company. Tech support was absolutely non-existant for this product and since Franklin is not selling it directly I have a feeling tech support would be completely non-existant now. This product is something I would not recommend to anyone. If you wish to have something that is user friendly, reliable and great to just read ebooks - I would highly recommend the ebookwise reader.

I am very happy with my ebookman-901, there are one or two things that I am not too pleased about. Number one being the MMC , once you load one that you have stored books on, back into your ebookman to read later on, is that its takes forever for it to bring the books up to read, also its makes up the ebookman infor., you end up having to download the os applications again or it won't sync. The second thing is its hard finding places that you can find to download music from onto your ebookman. But since I mainly use mine to for ebooks that's is great by me. Thanks again for this product I can carry so my books with me now to choose to read from now.

I purchased the ebookman 901 and i do enjoy the product but i bought the product with a...rebate from franklin that they offered and after 6 months and 3 inquiries to franklin i have still not received my rebate or even an answer from them so while my amazon.com experience was very good i do not recomend trying to deal with franklin electronics.

Everything you read in the other reviews is correct. The product is buggy and does not work anywhere near as advertised. PDA users seem satisfied with it, but I bought it as an eBook -- BIG MISTAKE. Even if they had decent software to load your text into Franklin format (their "tools" run under a Unix emulator on Windows, badly) and even if it read HTML files (you can download it quick enough, but you'll wait TWENTY MINUTES after you click the button to see the text), the screen is too small and battery life too short. Just say no. This is not an eBook.

For the most part I love my ebookman. You will go through a lot of battiers and sometimes it get hard to read the screen. Sometimes when you change the battiers you have to download your material again.

I was very disappointed in this device. I purchased one in Dec. 2001. Dispite claims to the contrary, you cannot change the batteries without wiping the system! This means you must then sync the e book with your PC and download everything again. Battery life is a miserable 7-10 days, even if you don't use the thing. It just sucks the life out of the batteries. The e book is basically unsusable for any serious application. The screen is not especially clear, and the PDA functions are pretty bad. You'd be better off with any palm or Win CE based device.

I bought this from here in december and got last friday.I spent my whole weekend and monday and tuesday trying to install the operating system without any luck. Tried to call technical dept. and the answer is "you may want to try 5 more times to install it as there are some problems lots of people are noticing,you are doing right steps to install".Battery compartment is worst,springs are at the positive end of battery and it never recovers for 30 min. after you remove the batteries to reboot it. Donot waste your money,buy handspring visor deluxe for ...(a little) more.