Going all Jimmy Carter over Sony Reader

I'll explain the title to all you youngsters out there: although I love my wife dearly, I have been experiencing serious lust in my heart for some of the gadgets around here. The latest object of my desire: the Sony Reader.

I've already professed my devotion to the e-book concept. But this is the first time I've ever seen an e Ink display. How good is it? When I first looked at it, my initial thought was that I was looking at a prototype with a fake paper screen pasted on. Then I pressed the menu button.

To tell the truth, the first pre-loaded book I checked out wasn't The Da Vinci Code, which was right under the selector -- it was the first volume of the Trigun manga. Even with only four grey levels (something of a disappointment; I was hoping for 16) at 170 dpi, the zipatone shading was crisp; somewhere in between the shoddy newsprint of Japanese manga weeklies and the white paper they're reprinted on in collected form.

The Reader is also a bit closer to the Star Trek ideal, in that it's a mere 250 g (just under 9 oz.). Expect the Reader to arrive in April; Denny Arar has more on the Reader here.