I admit. If I ever get a Sony Reader, the first thing I'd do is to hack it so I can access all the text files I already have. I want to be able to read, say, th

I admit. If I ever get a Sony Reader, the first thing I'd do is to hack it so I can access all the text files I already have. I want to be able to read, say, the electronic copies of David Weber's scifi books that I bought, the PDFs from my software reference library, the Art of War in the original Chinese, and whatever I want off of Gutenburg. I've seen the Sony Reader first-hand. There was a demo unit in one of the Border's in Atlanta. It looks a lot cooler than the Amazon device. It is almost as slim as an Apple iPhone. It also has a lot of random ports surrounding the device ... pretty useless if I can't get it to access the things I want it to access. Compared with the OLPC XO, it looks like it'd break if I drop it. On the other hand, the eInk display is everything the press says it is -- the fonts are crisp and the display is a pleasure to read in standard lighting. It has no backlights -- but neither does a hardback novel. The refresh rate is too slow for animations. It takes almost as long for the page to refresh as turning a page (that's probably perceptual ... I didn't time it with a stopwatch). It might just be easier to buy the eInk developer kit -- http://www.eink.com/kits/index.html http://www.eink.com/kits/index.html and roll your own. For about a $3k a pop.