Ebook readers aren't everybody's cup of tea, but if you are drawn to this class of device then you can't do better than the Cybook Gen3. It is a great little appliance that gets a lot of things right, and trades on simplicity rather than a whole bundle of features.

The Cybook Gen3 is not large: at 188mm tall, 118mm wide and 8.5mm thick it is clearly modelled on the size of a single paperback book. It is lighter than your average paperback at 174g, though, and with 64MB of storage memory and support for SD cards it can store a whole lot more data than one paperback book can.

And it is not resticted to just ebooks. The Cybook Gen3 can cope with TXT files, PDF and HTML, PalmDoc and Mobipocket PRC files too. And it can handle a couple of image formats; JPG, GIF and PNG. More even than that, it'll play MP3s back at you. You can get audio books in this format, or listen to music while you read. There is no speaker on the device so you have to use a headset jack that is compliant with the 2.5mm onboard connector.

The screen measures 6 inches across the diagonal and is based on e-ink, a technology that offers greyscale rather than colour output; four shades in this case. The great things about e-ink are its high definition, ‘flat' screen without shine or glare, and low power consumption, and while screen refreshes are visible and you do have to wait for them to take place, they didn't make me irritated during testing.

The battery is rated for 8,000 screen refreshes. How many etexts you can read in that number of screen refreshes is moot, because ‘books' are of differing lengths and you can choose between several font sizes and fonts for the display. If you don't like the fonts on offer you can add your own, incidentally. And if you play music while you read, you'll run the battery down quicker, of course.

The screen isn't touch-sensitive, so you rely on a navigation pad sitting to the bottom right of the screen and a few left and right side buttons. These variously call up menus and allow you to control music playback.

Getting material onto the Cybook Gen3 is a matter of hooking it up to your PC and using it as a mass storage device, or copying data into the appropriate folder on an SD card (folders are created when you pop a card into the Cybook for the first time). Alternatively, if you want to synchronise daily news feeds and suchlike, you can use MobiPocket Reader, although the latter option is only compatible with Windows.

I'm a sucker for books and have been testing ebook readers on PC, handheld and as standalone devices for as long as I can remember. The Cybook Gen3 is simply the best standalone option I have seen. This doesn't mean it is perfect. But it is one piece of review kit I intend to continue using.