Pocket Size: Bookman Is Best Reference Book
Jun 9, 1996
Jeffrey Gordon Angus
Special To The Seattle Times

Franklin Electronic Publishers has survived the myriad transmutations of the computer world's last 15 years by innovating - by doing things no one else was doing.

Its current unique offering is a line of "electronic books" called the Franklin Bookman. The devices, at 3 1/4- by 5 1/4- by 3/4- inches, are about the size of a medium calculator and fit in a big pocket. The liquid-crystal display screen shows about three rows of 40 characters.

Some come with software built in, but they all take additional "cartridges," multimegabyte, matchbook-size additions that each represent a volume. Titles include dozens of reference works, including the Concise Columbia Encyclopedia, Total Baseball, Parker's Wine Guide and the King James Bible.

I reviewed the Pocket Quicken Bookman, a $129 street price version of the electronic book that has the popular home money-tracking program by Intuit built in. You can use it as a stand-alone Quicken program, or use it to keep track of your transactions and then plug it into a personal computer running the program as the storehouse for your information.

For Quicken, the Franklin Bookman has some solid advantages. Quicken on a computer has always suffered from its lack of portability, and the lightweight Bookman is nothing if not easy to tote - you can always have it with you wherever you make a transaction. By entering transactions when you execute them, it means you don't have to set aside a specific time to do all your record-keeping at once. More people can cope with the administrative demands of Quicken in this Bookman form than ever could on a computer.

The down side is the limitation that all pocket assistants have: limited keyboard and display. The keyboard's key layout is like a typewriter's, meaning experienced people will find keys readily. Since the device isn't very input-intensive, it won't make much difference, but the keys are too small and too close together to handle touch typing. You will, however, have to learn some new keys, keys that don't exist on any other devices, to make the book work the way you'd like. It's not hard to learn, but many people will be a little surprised they need to learn anything. The LCD screen is text-only, but readable, but a graphic-less display will turn some people off.

Battery life isn't much of an issue; I got about 15 hours per pair of AAs.

I made extensive use of the Total Baseball Encyclopedia cartridge because it's based on a book I'm very familiar with. I was impressed with how much data it held and how easily you could glide from an individual's record to team records and vice versa. I was also disappointed that it didn't hold the whole book, which was an unrealistic expectation stoked by the amount it did have. The software supports pretty good searching and sorting for making of lists (the best home run per at bat ratio of any player before 1979, for example).

This search strength is even more useful in the Concise Columbia Encyclopedia title. Put the cursor over a word in an article, press the space bar and the Bookman looks up all related articles.

The Bookman is a startlingly effective bridge between the personal organizer and the reference book. Documentation and interface issues have room for improvement, but you can't carry more reference punch in your pocket than you can with the Bookman.

Franklin can be reached at (800) 266-5626.