EBook Readers

I bought one about a month ago. So far I'm pretty happy with it.

 The good:

• Good screen. The e-ink makes it very easy to read. It looks close enough to paper and reading for a long time during a flight did not cause my eyes to tire.
• Form factor is just right. The size gives a big enough screen while still making it small enough to carry. Weight is between a paperback and a hard cover.
• Good collection of availabe books at Sony's connect online store.
  
• Book prices are typically a couple of dollars under amazon. Of course there's still hard-cover prices for some of these ebooks. I guess these might be here to stay for a while :)
• A page-turn takes about a second. You quickly get over it since you learn to press the "next page" button while reading the last line.
• Great features like remembering where you were in each book, multiple bookmarks, etc.
• Lots of memory and a slot to add more (and not sony memory stick either!)
• Great battery life (if you don't play MP3s on it. I haven't tested that)
  

The could-improve:

• New books can only be purchased from Sony. Sony has not shared their DRM scheme with others so no buying from amazon or any of the ebooks retailers out there.
• Sony has not yet made deals with all publishers, so not all of them publish electronically for the reader. You'll still be buying some paper books.
• Its unclear what the policy of adding previously published works to the store is. Some old books show up, but there's no consistency.
  
• placement of buttons for page turning could
  be better. The way I hold the book, I'd like one more option to the two they provided.
• If you were used to holding the book by the spine, you can't. The spine is spineless :) - the reader comes with a leather cover but you can't use its axis for holding the book.
• No HTML support. No support for generic blogs (only the ones sony's store decided to support)
• Limited PDF support - they can'teasily reformat PDF so you either see the whole page on the screen which makes it very small, or you can rotate the screen and see the top half and bottom half separately. Makes it a problem reading multi-column pdfs.
• I've uploaded a magazine onto it to see if it's good for reading magazines too. I'll admit in advance that I had to do my own formatting so there might be improvements to be made, but overall it's not easy reading material you quickly want to leaf through. With each page turn a second and a typical article spanning multi-pages, it's difficult to quickly scan headings and bylines and decide what you want to read.

The business opportunity:

• I have hundreds of books at home. I'll pay $1US per book to give away the paper book and get an ecopy in return for a lot of them.
  

Overall - I recommend the reader. I'm enjoying reading it and the availability of titles is good enough to keep me happily reading away.