i was on a long haul flight yesterday and the guy sat next to me had a sony e-book reader, i asked him if i could have a play with it and i was seriously impressed. Before i had seen it i would have thought that for me it would be the worst gadget possible but i was very surprised how good it was. The words on the screen were as near as poss to reading from a book and the battery life is aparently extremely good.

Does anyone out there have one and if so what are the pros and cons.

Many Thanks.

Pros: the epaper displays work great in that application – no backlight, readable everywhere a book would be, and it only uses power when the screen changes, not when you're reading that screen's worth of words. And obviously you can carry a *lot* of books. There's a lot of classic literature that's out of copyright that you can download for free.

Cons: buying content is a pain in the arse, with all sorts of different places to buy from, various schemes for borrowing from public libraries (mainly in the US at the moment), and prices are sky-high. If you're one to pick up paperpacks for a few quid from Amazon once the initial hype has passed, you'll be in for a shock as it's pretty much RRP for something you can't pass on to someone else once you're done with it. The publishers are still deciding on when to release the ebooks, some do it straight away with the hardback, some later. It needs a book equivalent of iTunes, a one-stop-shop for all the publishers and a push towards lower prices and fewer restrictions. The devices themselves do annotation, highlighting and notetaking with varying degrees of success (mostly pretty poor) which is a shame as business use (reading the big documents that get emailed around a lot) is quite a promising market for them.

The people I know with them are book-junkies who either have long commutes or work overseas for weeks/months and can't just stop by a bookshop. There's no saving to be made over buying paper books, it's more that if you would carry several books on a trip, you can have them all on one device.

Yep, I have the PRS-505 and it goes almost everywhere with me. Over 100 books loaded on, and it syncs a load of RSS feeds over when it's connected to the computer.

I would recommend picking up a PRS-505 from eBay as opposed to getting one of the newer touch-sensitive ones. It means you end up with fingerprints on the screen and an extra layer of plastic over it. Alternatively, consider the iRiver Story.

Pros:

* Loads (and I mean loads) of books and music – two memory card slots so virtually unlimited storage.
* Lots of book sources available.
* Very cheap books if using the American store.
* Thin, lightweight, and it remembers your page.
* Adjustable font size.
* Unlimited bookmarks

Cons:

* Fragile (to an extent). It won't survive a fall onto concrete or a dip in the bath.
* Valuable, you can't leave it on the beach or by the pool on holiday.
* Books very expensive if bought from the Waterstones store.
* Battery powered.

I would buy another one in an instant.

I use mine for carrying data. I make pdfs of stuff I want to reference. Most of the time I don't need a computer.

Got a few books on it too, but not many.

one of the guys i work with gave me a copy of about 200 hundred books he has converted to pdf but they are pretty expensive gadgets for the amount i would use them to be honest.

Charity shop books for a quid then return them will stay my way for now methinks.

At a slight tangent, but probably still applies, I have three ebook apps on my phone, and a fair few books split between them. As ^^, there are many free books out there, some quite recent; Cory Doctorow is a big exponent of the free ebook movement, his last two books have had a free ebook release at the same time as the physical hardback, but they're rare. A big problem is regional copyright. I have several books by various authors, but when I've tried to buy the next book in a series, I've been refused because my c/card is not a US one! Other well known authors in the UK have restrictions on their entire ebook output, like Kathy Reichs, who writes the Tempe Brennan (Bones) books. Some are just incomplete, like William Gibson, who has the second and third books of a trilogy available, but the first on a completely different source, (Stanza/Kindle), or else the first and second books available, but the third unavailable anywhere. Another issue is appalling transferrence; I have two books, one by Larry Niven, the Gil The Arm stories, and another by Neil Stevenson, Diamond Age, and the spelling errors are unbelievable, they've obviously been scanned from hardcopy, then run through OCR 'ware, with no proofing carried out. The Niven book is almost unreadable, and I actually paid for that! Trouble is I don't know what to do about it; if it was a dead tree book, I'd go back to the shop, but with an ebook bought via an app, I don't know where to go to, and I'm sure this affects the actual ebook readers themselves, as well as phone apps.