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Indeed, Michael Whelan's cover art was fantastic, introducing a whole group of people to late 70s, early 80s fantasy.

Samples:
Dragonflight
Dragonquest
The White Dragon

The interface still could use a bit of work (the biggest improvement imo was the 1.4 update).

I think they may not have put enough thought into the design paradigm they would be using, as the short height of the touch screen gives very little throw to scroll menus with, and there is no part of the screen that is safe from registering a "button push" if you intended to scroll.

But the reading itself is great, (t's already turned me off to paper books for the most part) and the latest update made the page turns significantly faster.

The recent update also added a kind-of directory system to keep your books together (why they didn't do tags/labels instead is a mystery to me, though. The physical folder model is a limitation of imagination, not of the actual hardware)

Browsing the library does not use the network, though. I'm not sure why you got that impression from your test. I can only guess that some of the slowness was maybe cover-show mode, or that the original interface used a more cumbersome highlight method that took longer to draw/erase.

The best thing that I could say for it, though, is that unlike the Kindle, it reads ePubs natively. The format allows DRM, but does not require it; you can hand craft them from text without too much difficulty if you feel like it, and since they're just marked-up text, they reflow pretty easily.

Anyway, the 1.5 release is quite a bit improved from what they were shipping last year. If you're on the fence, it might be worth it to try it out in the store again.

"Max is a genetically engineered human, created by Manticore .. All the kids in Manticore had a number inserted into there genetic patterns that shows up as a barcode on the back of the neck" link

I count ten lasers colliding.

http://www.jedisaber.com/SW/wallpaper/death%20star%20firing.jpg

Your math is off (or your eyes are bad).

I count ten lasers colliding.http://www.jedisaber.com/SW/wallpaper/death%20star%20firing.jpg

I count Zero Laser beams colliding, since laser beams don't react that way, those beams must be something else.. Plasma maybe?

I count ten lasers colliding.

http://www.jedisaber.com/SW/wallpaper/death%20star%20firing.jpg

Remind me not to call on you when it's time to do inventory.

I count ten lasers colliding.

http://www.jedisaber.com/SW/wallpaper/death%20star%20firing.jpg

Here's another page on constructing an ePub file. It's much easier than I thought, and the page has a nice set of template files. And the format is supported by Calibre, which is a great tool for converting between ebook formats.

The thing is, we should have been at this point a long time ago ... but noooooo. Every company had to try their own hairbrained proprietary scheme and hope they could get everyone else to conform to it and pay royalties, even though the basic idea is, well, kind of obvious these days (some kind of XTML/CSS-based format).

I suppose some patent troll will probably try to undermine ePub too.