EBooks are back! Not that they ever left. (Though some might question whether they've really arrived yet.) In any case, when electronic books were first introduced, we got our hands on all of them. Nuvomedia's Rocket eBook was one of the strongest.

Recently, NuvoMedia introduced the Rocket eBook Pro, which keeps the easy-to-read screen of the original and ups the ante on storage to 16MB from the 4MB in the original. What's that mean to you? 16,000 pages of storage, up from 3,200. If that sounds excessive, perhaps the new price will appeal more to you: $270, down from the nearly $500 the original cost. We like that new price so much, we give the Rocket eBook Pro four out of five stars.

From the outside, it's tough to tell the Rocket eBook Pro from the original. The case looks the same, as does the 41/2 by 3-inch grayscale screen, which reads reasonably well in sunlight, though not nearly as well as paper.

While the book fits well in your hand, at 22 ounces it's still fairly heavy. You can rotate the text on the screen so it faces the up, no matter which direction you turn (or hand you use to hold) the book, and the backlight does a fine job making the book readable at night. Like its predecessor, the Rocket eBook Pro delivers an estimated battery life between 17 and 33 hours, depending on how much you use the backlight, and users can underline and annotate text throughout the book. But, as with the original Rocket eBook, we find using the Rocket eBook Pro's stylus to hunt and peck letters a slow process.