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Give me a $99 ebook reader, not a solar powered one. I'll buy batteries for the bloody thing.

http://www.ebookwise.com/ebookwise/ebookwise1150.htm

$109.95

When I bought mine many years ago, I distinctly remember it was around $90 including shipping... that's inflation for you.

I like the backlight, its durable, good battery life. Subjectively the screen comfortably holds about 75% of the text on a typical paperback.

Not exactly the nicest ebook around, but I like it. Have to use weird software to translate standard .txt into its weird little proprietary format, and install weird USB drives. Not a simple modern "plug in and it looks like a drive". And the screen resolution and contrast looks like a laptop from the early 90s... which is obviously perfectly usable, since I used a laptop back then, but not as good as modern gear. I'm actually kind of surprised they are still manufactured.

Back when you used to be able to buy stand alone palm pilot PDAs, as opposed to "cheap phones" with car payment sized monthly contracts, there was usually a model around the $100 price point, add some free reader software, and you're there... However, reading off a screen smaller than a post card was quite annoying.

You've pretty much described the Sony 505, although it's around $300 (although assumedly it will come down when the new 600 is released).

What you're paying for with the e-ink readers is the very-nice-screen, which looks like a printed page. If you're willing to suffer reading from an LCD screen, then check out the eBookwise reader, which is again pretty much exactly what you're describing. Although, very weird proprietary file formats.

My only touchscreen experience of any length is with an eBookwise eBook Reader. It doesn't have a boot process or anything tedious like that, so I just switch it off, clean, turn it back on. I'm guessing a tablet/subnotebook sort of device would not be able to do that.

My main issue with eInk is the lack of backlight. I use the eBookwise Reader which is very basic in its functionality. But the backlight allows me to read it in whatever light I'm in.

$140 is not cheap compared to the near identical 'electronic picture frames' that are selling for 1/3rd that price.

Electronic picture frame: Reads SD cards. Can parse image files and display them. Has a 5.6 inch color LCD. Has a few controls. Does not have a battery. Has speakers for some reason. $50

Ebook reader: Reads SD cards. Can parse text files and display them. Has a 5.5 inch B&W LCD. Has a few controls. Has a battery. $140

You seeing my problem now?

Now, that's being unfair to the ebookwise people. They also have a modem built in, but, more to the point, the reason it's so damn expensive is that they are incredibly old. I have nothing against them. If it wasn't for them the damn market would be completely empty.

The problem is that no one actually appears willing to actually manufacture a new device, which with modern engineering should cost about 60 dollars. (The added expense being the battery system. OTOH, B&W LCDs might cancel that out.)

Yeah, yeah, I know eInk is expensive, but there are no cheap LCD ones either.

"When I can buy a cheap laptop for $399.00 that does more then an e-reader, why in hell would I spend the money for an e-reader?"

Because until the Asus EEE came along, no laptop in the world could do what an e-reader does: wheigh less than a pound. This is important.

That's not to say the price of e-readers couldn't and shouldn't be lower. I've always felt 50 USD was the sweet spot. You can get an e-reader for about 110 USD (shipping not counted), and Sony had a deal until two weeks ago where you could get their Reader for the price of 50 USD plus your soul. (The soul bit entailed applying for their credit card.)

With Palm using Linux, is there any word on people being able to develop 3rd part programs to read Secure eReader books? I'd love to be able to migrate my secure eReader books to eBookwise without downloading illegal copies.

Heinous profiteering. It's not just the publishers, but the device manufacturers and electronic distributers. DRM and other forced proprietarianism used to artificially inflate prices to maximize profit at the cost of the medium. Quite sad, hopefully wont last long. I bought an ebook reader not too long ago (an eBookwise 1150, partly due to other mentionings on slashdot), and it's a great turd. The price is a bit high for the device itself. It only displays one proprietary format, for which there is a converter, but the converter runs only under windows (not even in wine). It only really imports text and even then most of the formatting is lost. The screen is black and white (tho contrast is good). The firmware is fixed, with no chance for extending. The device only wants to talk to its hardwired content provisioner, who have the gall to ask new paperback prices for digital editions. Such an insult to efficiency! No cost for harvesting, material, transportation, production, printing, distribution, vending... only writing, layout and proofing and digital distribution. Digitial distribution costs are negligible, with the majority of the work in writing and a small amount in layout and proofing. So, of the cost of these ebooks, the majority is artificial and going right into the pockets of the less deserving. No wonder ebooks have not taken off. It's hard to get a rock to roll uphill. If this is state of the art after millenia of written history, then we should be ashamed. All this being said, there is nothing wrong with the form factor, reading a book on the device is pleasant and the battery life is excellent. What's holding back the slim geode/xscale (or similar) paperback sized wireless colour expandible linux running pdf displaying cheap ebook reader? I'm guessing it's because the many writeoff ebooks due to the current state of affairs (or lack thereof). There's no shortage of ebooks out there... if you can circumvent the crap that actually prevents them from being useful.

I will have to agree with Yagu on a couple points.

1) Price - non-free eBooks are way too expensive. Free eBooks are not as comprehensive in selection.
2) Device - the Sony eBook Reader looks to be the end-all, be-all of eBook readers, so I was going to look into that when it arrives in April. It would be interesting to see if the new Origami devices can handle multiple eBook formats. Although since it has a full OS on there you could just up your favorite eBook ready software.

Anyways, once these two things are fixed, I could get heavily into eBooks instead of paperback.

On a side note, I did buy the reader from eBookWise and I like it. It is only greyscale and only reads a few formats (not including PDF or images), but it is nice for simple eBooks and Word Docs. I got this until something better comes along.

Z

Check out eBookwise for their eBook hardware. Long story short, it's a rebadged eBook reader, but my wife bought one for me last January for my birthday, and I absolutely love it.

It uses SmartMedia cards, but I have probably 40-50 books on a 128MB card, and am using less than a third of the available space. It's also very easy to read, and is about the same screen size as a paperback, and the weight of a medium sized hardcover novel.

I highly recommend it for a dedicated eBook reader. The backlight is nice, and it's got about 20 hours on a full charge...

http://www.ebookwise.com/ebookwise/ebookwise1150.h tm I recently got one of these things and it's a great deal. It cost me around $100 (I think it's gone back up to $130 now), so it's not terribly expensive, and it only weighs about a pound or so. You can import your own texts to it (i.e. project gutenberg texts), it can use Smartmedia cards (up to 128mb), so you can store a LOT of books, and the batteries last for about 25 hours and can just be charged off of 12V dc. Hook up a small 12V solar panel to trickle-charge it and you've got yourself around 300+ books for ~$150 or so!