What's the deal with this thing?

It's got 100 classic books for you to read on the DS?

It's a good idea except that the text, even on the smallest font is way too big and doesn't feel crisp enough.(Why the hell does it have to try to emulate a real book on a low-res screen?) Near, if not all, books were simply taken from Project Gutenberg for free. The UI is ok but feels clumsy at times as I often opened up the scrollbar at the bottom or the main menu from the top. By far the most annoying thing is the 'bookshelf', why not just a list? Not only do I have to rotate my DS 90deg CCW but also an additional 90deg to read the spines of the books on the faux bookshelf. I can see why they thought it would be clever to make it look like a bookshelf but, in real life, books are placed on bookshelves like that because its the most efficient. On a DS, it fails. Overall it's not a tough one to rate, the books themselves are in a category of their own, but if I had to rate this 'eBook' frontend. 2.5/10. An experienced dev could have whipped up similar in no time at all and I see no real improvement over the homebrew counterparts aside from some churched up presentation, and that doesn't matter at all once you're actually reading a book.  

Edit: And no highlight or search function? Pffft.

This post has been edited by three14, Wed, December 24th, 2008 at 01:23

It's a terrible sign when they can't beat the homebrew counterpart (dslibris). I'll give it a run later, but the pics I've seen confirm what three14 says - it looks ugly, it's formatted poorly (wide ass spacing, huge font). The list of books also includes way too much Shakespeare, which couldn't possibly be helped by the formatting. An embarrassingly pointless exercise. Perhaps it was the prospect of lawsuits that killed it, from making kids myopic. Or the fact that the DSi will do the same thing better, and they're just testing the waters.

20 quid - jeez

apparently what they only half understood is that reading on the DS really work. DSlibris could make things easier as far as converting books, could be slightly more stable and load more of them; but I've used it consistently and it's almost as good as the real thing. This "classic book collection" should have come out long ago, and instead of being a Harper Collins cross-promotion exercise, acted as a frontend for Project Gutenberg in some form. Preloaded of course, but with a wifi network on top (not just "ten more books"). What a waste of real potential.

This post has been edited by polyglot, Thu, December 25th, 2008 at 02:28

I lawl at its wifi.

What does it do? And what are the 10 books that are supposedly on offer?

Bah... it's an european game but english only language  

You can't download all of the available extra books on the R4DS I assume with the filesize of the .sav being 512kb

The memory of the game cart is flash 2Mbit (256Kbytes), the R4DS is not the problem. http://www.advanscene.com/html/Releases/dbrelds.php?id=3292

This post has been edited by logical thinker, Mon, January 12th, 2009 at 20:43