TrekStor eBook Reader Pyrus review

While most of TrekStor’s eBook readers have colour LCD screens and can double as media players, the six inch Pyrus is a more traditional reader with an e-paper display and few extras. There’s no integrated MP3 player for your audiobooks, for example.

We’ve seen much better-quality e-paper displays than the Pyrus’s 6in version. We don’t seriously object to the slightly yellowish background colour, but the soft edges to text and slow refresh rate don’t compare well to most rivals. The reader’s design isn’t brilliant either – it’s a little too wide to hold comfortably with one hand, particularly if your hands are small. The page turn buttons are well positioned, though – there are forward and back buttons on each side of the display, so you can easily reach both buttons whether you have the reader in your left or right hand.

There are four labelled control keys at the bottom of the reader, which take you home, open the settings menu for whichever screen or document you currently have open, go back a step and open the search box. In the centre is a four-way navigation pad with a centre button with an uncomfortably spiky nubbin in the middle. These controls let you move around your library, select letters in the text entry matrix for the search box and navigate menus.

Like most readers, the Pyrus comes with its own software – you’ll find Windows and Mac OS X installers on the reader’s internal storage. The software gives you access to TrekStor’s branded bookshop and let you authorise your reader for eBooks encrypted with Adobe Digital Editions DRM. The first time you run the program, you’re prompted to download and install Adobe Digital Editions. If you already have an Adobe account, you can log into it via the Digital Edition software to gain access to all the titles you’ve bought previously.

Once you’ve logged in to your Digital Editions account, you’re promoted to authorise your reader. You’ll then be able to use Digital Editions to view books already on the reader – all the sample books are in German in this case – and manage the titles present on your PC. Once your reader is authorised you can also manage Digital Editions books using powerful third-party tools such as Calibre.

TrekStor’s software may look slightly clunky, but it gives you an easy way to view the books present on your reader and lets you open them in Adobe Digital Editions for reading on your PC.
The software’s Shop tab opens up the Eason online bookshop, which lets you buy physical as well as electronic books. We had no problems registering for the service and there seemed to be a reasonable selection of books available.

If you can’t find what yoou need on the Eason shop, there’s nothing to stop you using other non-Amazon bookshops; the Pyrus is compatible with a fairly wide range of eBook formats, including the ubiquitous EPUB format sold by online retailers from Foyles to WHSmith. You can also buy EPUB books directly from many publishers’ websites. We tested the Pyrus with a variety of other file formats, including HTML, MOBI, TXT and PDF, all of which worked.

We were pleased with the reader’s ability to reflow and resize the text from even a heavily illustrated PDF while still leaving the illustrations in a sensible position relative to the text. It’s not perfect and some images weren’t correctly picked up, but it’s good enough for reading product manuals, for example. With other formats, we had occasional problems with the default size and margins of the text not being to our satisfaction – our test EPUBs were initially rendered with inordinately large lettering. We were able to change the font size from large to the more readable medium size using the settings menu, but changing the settings of one book doesn’t introduce persistent changes for all – there’s also no option in the main settings menu to change the default font size for all documents.

The Pyrus has 4GB of internal storage and has a microSDHC card slot which allows you to add up to 32GB of extra space, so you won’t ever run out of room for books. At the low price of £66, we can forgive the reader’s lack of features, but its awkward size and mediocre screen meant we didn’t find it very comfortable to use. Both the Kobo eReader Touch and Amazon Kindle Touch are worth the extra cost.