Gadgets: Franklin eBookMan 901 <br></br>Mini Book Light <br></br>Lexibook Collins DL600 Pocket Electronic Dictionary <br></br>Franklin Literacy Word Bank <br></br>C-Pen 800C

Words come easier to some than to others. David Phelan picks out devices designed to make it easier to find that mot juste

There are few things in the world less gadgety than books. In the 550 odd years since Johann Gutenberg first started knocking out copies of the Bible on his printing press, little has changed about the way books are read – left to right, top to bottom; that's part of their enduring charm. But now that they are written, typeset and printed with the use of computers, isn't it time that we read them with a little help from the microchip?

Franklin eBookMan 901 £129.99, Franklin 0800 328 5618

It's hard to imagine an electronic book ever replacing the paper version – it still doesn't have the clarity of text and there isn't the same tactile enjoyment. What's more, our memories work better with physical objects – it's easier to remember that an article appeared on a left-hand page somewhere near the top than it is to remember the electronic equivalent. Nonetheless the eBookMan, which looks like a personal organiser, and works like one too, makes a decent alternative. In the US there is a range of other electronic books available, but here in the UK Franklin has the market sewn up. Downloading books and documents is straightforward and it has the advantages that electronic text searching offers: type in a key word and it'll take you there. The eBookMan also works as a music player and has an organiser, calendar, address book, dictionary and calculator too. You need internet access to set it up properly and it comes with 8Mb of built-in memory, which is expandable with an additional memory card. It comes with a free download of the Oxford English Minidictionary and more, and the 911 version also has bilingual translator facility.

Mini Book Light £29.99, I Want One Of Those 0870 241 1064 or www.iwantoneofthose.com

Book lights have the same advantage as your reading light when you're on an aeroplane and the main lights are turned off. Switch it on and you can read late into the night without grunts of complaint from the person beside you. Neat and tiny, this one folds down to just 13cms long, and it's very light; light enough, indeed, to clip onto the book without you even noticing it. Plug it into the mains, or if you're too far from the nearest socket, use the battery pack. Extend the head to switch it on.

Lexibook Collins DL600 Pocket Electronic Dictionary £29.99, Lexibook 01730 231015 or www.lexibook.co.uk

If you're sticking with traditional books and it turns out the author's vocabulary is bigger than yours, you may consider the services of an electronic dictionary. Lexibook's machine contains the entire database from the Collins Pocket English Dictionary and has a 90,000-word database complete with inflections (once you've learnt the meaning of the obscure word you can pronounce it with suitable confidence), as well as full word definitions. There's also a thesaurus of more than 700,000 words and a special function which finds and defines easily confused words. If you need further persuading, the crossword function and anagram feature may convince you, and it claims to be the fastest dictionary in the world.

Franklin Literacy Word Bank £39.99, Franklin 0800 328 5618

The Word Bank is an excellent tool for pupils at Key Stages 1 and 2, and contains the Oxford Primary Dictionary and Thesaurus. It's cute, brightly coloured and has the kind of looks that will make kids want to use it and learn. It also has some 26,000 dictionary entries along with 50,000 synonyms to expand the vocabulary. The Word Bank will provide corrections for phonetic spelling (so "nolij" is corrected to show "knowledge", for example) and even contains a list of easily confused words to make clear that sea (as in ocean) is different to see (as in look). There are games, such as "Fun With French", mathematical brain-teasers and a built-in calculator.

C-Pen 800C £219.99, Datamind 0870 770 0848

Perhaps there's a quote you want to save, and later send as an e-mail. With the C-Pen you can transfer the text into electronic form instantly. It's like a scanner and uses OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to gobble up the words on your page and spit them out via infra-red connection to your PC. Providing the text is sized between 7 point and 20 point, it'll transfer the words at up to 100 characters per second. It has a Flash memory card which can store more than 2,000 pages of text (in case you want to transcribe War and Peace a couple of times), and additionally can hold up to 1,000 addresses and phone numbers. There's also a memo pad facility. So far, so PDA. On the other hand, it has a C Dictionary function which permits translation from English to French, or Spanish, Italian and other languages, although you have to decide which foreign language to download from the CD and buy extra dictionary licences if you want more. Suitable for left-handed people as well as right, this really is a portable pen pal.