eBooks, Take Three

I don"t care if you call them e-paper, e-books, e-readers, or even e-gregious (okay, that last one's unlikely) -- tablet-shaped, lightweight, straight-outta-Star Trek readers are a good idea. I would love to do with my books and magazines what I've done with my CDs: digitize the lot of them and stick the originals in storage. (See? We're back to the storage thing again.)

I've been a proponent of e-books since the days of NuvoMedia's ill-fated Rocket eBook -- heck, even as far back as Sony's ill-considered MiniDisc-based MD Book. So Gizmodo"s report that iRex Technologies" iLiad reader is due for a 2006 launch is welcome, especially since it hits just about all of my criteria for a viable product of this type. It's about the size and weight of the Watchmen graphic novel, has a battery that can withstand a week of commuting time, reads three kinds of flash memory, and has WiFi and Ethernet connectivity. It also reads PDF, XHTML, and text files, rather than leaning on some arcane proprietary format. (Though its operating temperature floor of 32 degrees Farenheit -- 0 degrees Celsius for us Canadians -- won't help much in a typical Montreal winter.)

We're not talking magazine-quality displays here -- the 16-level greyscale and 160 dpi resolution are serviceable at best -- but by iRex's own admission, this is, for them, a first-generation product. But if they can keep the price reasonable, this is a good start.