E-readers: preliminary report
We received our ereaders this week and just a couple of early observations. First off it cost a lot of money for the Iliad reader from irex. The total cost Cdn. was almost 1000 dollars! That is 3x the cost of the Sony reader. $120.00 of that was for shipping. O.K. that is too much. The sad part is that the handling fee was only $8 and gst and pst made up the rest. Ouch. It remains to be seen if the extra cost is actually worth it.

The Sony reader came with excerpts of books which is about as useful as reading the back of a book. I mean why bother. Include the whole text or nothing. I got a public domain copy of Vanity Fair and loaded that on and also loaded some word documents which so far has been the best use of the reader. Technical documents make a lot of sense on the readers.

I'm not crazy about the usability of the form factor for the Sony reader. There are things I want to do like scroll the page that you just can't do and it is frustrating.

More on the software and form factor later.