Sol reader\u2019s remote control looks slick, although I\u2019m curious why the company didn\u2019t choose to use eye-tracking as a control mechanism instead. Image Credit: Sol Reader<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The $350 device is currently on pre-order, comes in a handful of colors, and contains a pair of side-lit, e-ink displays, much like the Kindle does. The glasses come with a remote (I wish my Kindle had a remote!) and a charger. A full battery gets you around 25 hours of reading. That may not sound like a lot, but if you have an average adult reading speed of around 200 words per minute, you can finish the 577,608-word tome Infinite Jest in about 48 hours. That means you need at least one charging break, but then, if you are trying to read Infinite Jest in a single sitting, you\u2019re a bigger book nerd than most.<\/p>\n

The product has a diopter adjustment built in, so glasses- and contacts-wearers can use the glasses without wearing additional vision correction (up to a point \u2013 the company doesn\u2019t specify the exact adjustment range). The displays are 1.3-inch, e-ink displays with 256\u00d7256 per-eye resolution. The glasses have 64MB of storage, which should hold plenty of books for even the longest of escapist holidays.<\/p>\n

The company\u2019s $5 million funding round was led by Garry Tan (Initialized, Y Combinator) and closed about a year ago. Today, the company is shipping the \u2018advanced copy\u2019 (read: private beta) of the glasses to a small number of early access testers. The company is tight-lipped on when its full production batches will start shipping, and customers are currently advised to join the waiting list if they want to get their mittens on a pair of Sols.<\/p>\n

The reader in me wants these things really badly. My inner CFO is swearing his little heart out at the idea of spending $350 on a pair of reading glasses (pun sort of intended). And the environmentalist in me is curious whether a single-use device only for reading is a reasonable use of the planet\u2019s resources when I already have a VR headset, a phone, a kindle and a shelf full of books I have yet to read.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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