If you’re a fan of the Sony Reader PRS500, check out M-edge Accessories (http://www.buymedge.com) for some nice accessory jackets/cases for the Reader!  They make a line of Executive jackets in multiple colors and a sleeve jacket that provides excellent protection of your Reader at the beach/pool/gym.

My experience in the ebook area also questions the need for a separate device.  Improved small screens on iPhone and iPods, as well as other devices, eliminate the need for yet another gadget to haul around.  Ebooks are great for convenience and reducing friction in the buying channel....this new reader isn’t there yet. 
Jean Bedord
Shore Communications

The price for the readers is ridiculous. They need to take a lesson from the DVD world (well, pre format-war anyway) and make the player CHEAP and charge for the CONTENT! That way they’ll sell way more, it won’t be too precious to take on the beach, and authors, rather than hardware companies, actually see some rewards.

None of the screens of phones, PDAs or iPods are large enough for serious reading - reading an entire book that is. Yes, they may have pretty high resolution but not everybody has the eyes of a hawk to actually benefit from such resolution. I challenge anybody to read a couple of ebooks on these mini screens and enjoy the experience.

A reading device with a larger screen is therefore a necessity for ebooks to really break through. Something between your typical laptop screen and your cell phone screen. Ideal would be a flexible screen that could be rolled up or folded up for reading and stored away small. But these devices seem to take a couple of years to hit the shelfs.

Unfortunately Amazon made a huge error by introducing their own proprietory ebook format. I am waiting for a company that gets it and releases an open ebook reader that doesn’t limit one on format.

I’m absolutely thrilled.  These screens are revolutionary.  Resolution improvements you speak of make no difference, and the other devices are completely incomparable.  This isn’t a light-based screen… it’s flipping tiny little particles with white on one side and black on the other.  my eyes hurt too much to read off a PDA or phone or laptop for long periods of time.  I’m certainly not going to go home and read a book on a laptop screen after staring at a monitor all day at work.  I would quite literally go blind.  These are like reading paper.  Apples and oranges.

This is the future, once people realize how much they need these.  It’ll take a while to catch on.  I was skeptical too when I first heard of these ideas, mostly because I couldn’t imagine reading book after book on an LCD.  It’s not an LCD, it’s electric paper.  This is going to save trees.  It’s going to save me space.  It means I can travel and have decent reading material with me, whereas before traveling out of a backpack I was limited to one or two books + travel guides.  All that money spent on printing and ink, soon to be no more.  palm devices are not a solution.

I’m thinking about buying the cybook.  The sony seems idiotic to me mostly because it won’t handle anything but English characters.  I don’t understand why they wouldn’t put in the minuscule amount of extra effort to support unicode formats and extra fonts.  I’ll need Chinese characters.

and in terms of the price, well worth it.  When working on the assumption that I cannot read from an lcd, this is cheaper than any other option.  It’s cheaper than paper books and bookcases and storage space.  I’ve spent hundreds of dollars on shipping costs sending books from one place to another as I’ve traveled and moved… and this would buy me access to stuff I just otherwise couldn’t have.

I hope that this does catch on quickly, that people realize how much benefit these devices are so that they can be sold cheaper.  so that universities stop having people lug around piles of expensive text books.  so we stop wasting all this paper and ink and money.  ... and so I can get a nicer device cheaper

I mean, that whole “200$ laptop thing.” giving every kid one of these, fully loaded with every old book who’s copyright has expired....  that would be much more valuable than a laptop.  Some kid who isn’t in computer programming, in some poor place that maybe doesn’t even have internet, what’s he going to do with a laptop?  write papers he can’t afford to print?  play video games?  Giving them one of these loaded up with free books would actually present them with access to a whole world of otherwise not-so readily accessible information.

And as they catch on, more ebooks will be available.  I’m looking forward to having my college calculus textbook *always* in my backpack.  That’d be a really nice feeling.

oh, and in the article, “instead of supporting the open e-book standard” ... what is this open standard?  backed by companies like adobe?  do you mean adobe’s encrypted pdfs, that adobe must have come up with?  I hate pdf files, and most ebook readers can’t properly resize them to a non 8.5x11 screen. I also don’t see a large scale seller of pdf-file based ebooks.  Either way, I’m not about to praise adobe as a wonderful industry standard.  Their software (such as acrobat reader) is terrible.  but maybe they’re not who you mean?  I don’t know too much about this DRM stuff in terms of ebooks, I only know of the sony book store, these mobipocket people that amazon bought, and encrypted pdf files.  I think I’ll be happiest with the amazon/mobipocket route.  I am a little bummed that the mobipocket software only runs in windows, but it doesn’t seem like it’s that critical to use their software, i imagine you can just download the files too.  I’m not sure, I haven’t actually ordered one of these things yet.  I’m really looking forward to it though.

-brian

They have yet to come up with anything that can compete with the REB1100. When they can get an ebook reader with a back light for reading at night and a multiple format reader they will have the perfect reader.  They also need to realize that an ebook should not cost as much as a paper book.  You are not selling individual books each time you are only downloading for each purchase.  The expense should be much less for the retailer than when he sells a paper or hard back books
Linda.