£189, www.coolreaders.co.uk

What is it? A thin, lightweight British-designed ebook reader that is cheaper — and, with eight colour options, considerably more cheerful — than its most widely available rival, the £220 Sony PRS-505. Like the Sony, the Cool-er is built around a 6in e-Ink screen, a low-power display that shows text clearly in soft tones of grey. The Cool-er outdoes the Sony with its 1GB of built-in memory — enough to hold 1,000 ebooks. Both machines have the option to add up to 4GB more with an SD memory card. The Cool-er supports the Adobe Digital Editions and ePub file formats, which between them cover the vast majority of electronic books available to buy — or, in the case of out-of-copyright works, to read for free — and has an online bookshop at www.coolerbooks.co.uk. It also displays PDFs, the format used to store most digital magazine and newspaper layouts, and Jpeg images, and plays MP3 audio files, turning it into an audiobook reader too, for which a pair of headphones is supplied.

Should I buy one? The build quality is not as good as the Sony’s, but it’s as easy to use and lighter to hold. You will need a computer to download and transfer books, and to recharge the battery, which is good for 8,000 page turns, via USB. It’s available to buy from Friday.

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