The big debate over printed books becoming obsolete thanks to the portable e-book readers, has been on for the longest time. That fear, however, has proved to largely unfounded as publishers continue to flourish and printed books are still flying off the bookshelves.

But that does not mean that we do not move ahead technologically in sync with the times. The romanticism of leafing through a classic on a mellow Sunday afternoon remains a pleasure to be treasured by a bookworm. But in that quest of knowledge and pleasure, what’s forgotten is the damage it causes to the environment. For remember that every piece of printed paper is produced by the destruction of trees. And hence, if an eco-friendly, technologically advanced form of reading is the way forward, so be it.

But whatever we do, it should be done in style. Although the market for different eReaders has been swelling rapidly, leading to the market being swamped by a variety of eReaders, most of them are not even a patch on the aesthetically pleasing physical form of a book. But that’s about to change.

The aesthetics department of an ebook reader can now boast of a real cool super-thin, ebook reading/music playing hybrid. And its name could not be more apt than this. Called the COOL-ER eBook Reader, it has a black and white e-ink display. And when it comes to memory, the expandable 1GB storage can hold as many as 500-800 novels. That sure is a lifetime supply of books.

The COOL-ER is blessed with compact features. It boasts of a large 6 inch display but at the same time, is only 7.2 inch (183mm) tall, 4.65 inch (118mm) wide and 0.43 inch (11mm) thick. At 6 ounce, COOL-ER is like a breeze and it’s almost unbelievable that the tiny device can hold MP3 music files along with PDF, RTF, TXT, HTML, JPG and many more.

But what’s actually cool about the COOL-ER looks? The answer may put you off but the knockoff of iPod is the USP of COOL-ER. The reader also includes a form of Apple’s scroll-wheel, an innovation which was meant for easy navigation and arrangement of music files. The scroll-wheel now comes handy to leaf through tables of content and pages. The Lithium-Polymer battery of the eReader takes about three hours to charge and that can last you for 8000 page turns. And if you think 500–800 novels are not enough for a lifetime, additional storage space can be created by adding another SD card.