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I have switched to buying all my technical books as ebooks only (lack of storage space and need for Ctrl-F). So far I have found everything I wanted without DRM, or breakable. I really liked the watermark approach that InformIT used for one book: Each page says "From the Library of <MY NAME>". Excellent solution because I do not intend to illegally distribute my ebooks, but I want to use them freely on different devices.

I use Amazon to evaluate the books and buy somewhere else. InformIT, O'Reilly, Apress and eBooks.com have served me well.

As for the E-Reader itself, I tried a Sony with touchscreen in a shop and liked it. Good choice for novels. But I need a 10" screen and possibly color for technical books with illustrations. These look promisiing:

enTourage eDGe (love the concept, and this is very close to actual shipping)

NotionInk ADAM

PLASTIC LOGIC QUE

Skiff Reader

Copia

ASUS DR-950

Samsung E101

Kindle DX: Can only be considered when it comes with first class PDF capabilities and when I can copy files back and forth via USB (maybe you can?).

Apple iPad: If I can easily use my PDF and .prc files with it, it is worth considering. Did this thing actually ship by now??

Microsoft Courier: Twice 7" would be to small. If it has the format of the enTourage eDGe it might be worth a look. Microsoft is quite good at making hardware :-)

I have high hopes for this http://www.plasticlogic.com/. Although initially it will be aimed for business use (i.e expensive) hopefully the technology price will come down

I'm waiting for the plastic logic reader:

http://www.plasticlogic.com/

It is almost A4 size, mm-thin and doesn't look like shit.

Unfortunately it won't be out until 2010 and will probably be quite expensive ('aimed at the business market').

Still, it will be awesome for reading scientific papers, sheet music, manuals, reports and of course books.

Plastic Logic has been working on this technology with eInk. Here are some technical papers.

Call it desktop manufacturing. For gadget geeks in need of instant gratification, it's a miracle. For designers deep in the iterative prototyping process, it's a revolution in product development. And thanks to small tech, it's becoming a reality.

University of California, Berkeley engineering professor John Canny and his colleagues are building such a printer. They call the technology "polymer mechatronics" or, more simply, flexonics. The revolutionary approach to desktop manufacturing is enabled by recent advances in 3-D printers, organic electronics and polymer actuators.

Three-dimensional printers are commonly used to make prototypes of new product designs. For example, a designer may load a digital design into a Fused Deposition Modeling machine. The FDM then extrudes thin beads of ABS plastic in .01-inch layers, until you have a completed passive functional part or device. While the printers are dropping in price, the leap from producing passive to active devices is monumental. That's where organic electronics come into play.

Organic electronics were born in the 1970s when researchers discovered that chemically doping organic polymers, or plastics, increases their electrical conductivity. Since then, researchers have worked to develop the most effective and inexpensive organic compounds that can be patterned on flexible substrates to create useful circuits. In the private sector, companies ranging from Bell Labs to IBM to UK startup Plastic Logic are also working to develop quality organic transistors that are fabricated far more cheaply than silicon circuits. Organic semiconductors will most likely first hit the market in the form of inexpensive radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags and flexible display screens.

Canny's co-investigator in Berkeley's flexonics effort, Vivek Subramanian, is one of many researchers harnessing the microfluidic precision of inkjet printing technology to deposit organic semiconductors in desired patterns. The key ingredient in Subramanian's organic circuits is "liquid gold." Synthesized in his laboratory, liquid gold consists of gold nanocrystals that are only 20 atoms across and melt at 100 degrees Celsius, 10 times lower than normal.

The gold nanocrystals are encapsulated in an organic shell of an alkanethiol (an organic molecule containing carbon, hydrogen and sulphur) and dissolved in ink. As the circuit is printed on plastic, paper or cloth using inkjet technology, the organic encapsulant is burned off, leaving the gold as a high-quality conductor.

Combining Subramanian's circuit printing technology with a 3-D printer enables electronics to be embedded within the housing of the device being printed. The chassis and the electronics are fabricated as one single structure.

The next step is to add the actuators that provide electromechanical capabilities to the devices - for instance, a mechanism that causes the blender's blades to spin when switched on. For this, Canny plans to fill inkjet cartridges with electroactive polymers that contract when zapped with a voltage, enabling components to flex in desired directions. Additionally, the polymers generate a voltage when compressed, so buttons and switches can also be embedde

Metal? Metal you say?

Conductive Polymers should solve that whole problem pretty well.

One of the other pretty cool technologies being developed by the guys at Plastic Logic (a spin off company created by the same people from Cambridge University who formed CDT) is the ability to create full electronic devices by using an inkjet printer loaded with a cartridge of these conductive polymers. It would be pretty cool to be able to see a useful device on a web page, download the circuit, print it out of your inkjet and then have the working device straight away.