Sony e-Book with electronic paper

This device from Sony should be popular with people who commute without driving. I used my Apple Newton like an eBook when I commuted for a year from San Diego to San Francisco (technical lead on a fraud detection expert system for PacBell). The Newton was expensive and ill suited for use as an eBook. The new Sony device looks just about perfect: digital paper technology is easy to read in full sun light or indoors and the device is only 1/2 inch thick. Last year my toy purchase was a Sony Portable Play Station and this year it will probably be a Sony e-Book reader.

The Sony Reader also works with PDFs and plain text. In the last few years I have more frequently offered both static and dynamically generated PDFs of content on web portals that I work on. The ability to have a watch list of web sites, automatically gather material for a device like a Sony Reader sounds like a winner. Not counting play time on Slashdot, Reddit, etc., I usually have to spend several hours a week reading papers and other technical information from the web. The Sony Reader looks like a better alternative to balancing a laptop or (what I often do) print material in draft mode for offline reading.

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