Cheap perl e-books

[Billy Abbott]

Peter Corlett wrote:
> On 25 Aug 2009, at 16:43, David Cantrell wrote:
> The downside of ebooks is that they're a bit hard to read on the throne, 
> and generally come in awkward formats, just to make them even less 
> useful. Is there an ebook reader out yet that doesn't suck?

I swear by my Sony PRS-505. You have to ignore the Sony client software, 
get used to the 'flash' it does at it refreshes, have occasional issues 
with PDFs and pay silly amounts to get commercial books on there without 
being naughty, but I rather like it. There's also a bunch of hacked up 
firmwares to play with.

They're also just about to release another couple of models - the 
prs-600 (Reader Touch - it has a touch screen, does annotations, 
searching, etc) and the prs-300 (Reader Pocket - it's small). They've 
got (allegedly, I've not seen them yet) better e-ink tech than the 505, 
as well as official support for Macs (rather than just using Calibre 
(http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/), as I've been for the last almost year).

They're not perfect (or cheap), but with the e-paper tech moving on 
they're getting closer to mass market items. If only the publishers knew 
how to market and price ebooks...

And no, paper books aren't going anywhere. However, ebooks and papery 
books can happily coexist (the number one thing people seem to assume is 
that I never touch paper any more for idealogical reasons. No).

--billy (who just moved house and is thankful he saved about one box of 
books by having the Reader)

-- 
http://billyabbott.co.uk
You say tomato, I say EMACS