Are you an avid reader and would like to buy cheap books. Armchair Heaven has it all. Great books at great prices….

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Its very nice, i love it….

Think back, though. Great wails went up from the audiophile community when CDs came along. “They’re not the same, they have no soul” was the oft-heard cry. However, most people now buy CDs or downloaded music. There’s still a market for records (although diminishing), so the two have coexisted for twenty years without problems.

I believe that printed-on-paper books will remain for some time, but reserved for smaller and smaller markets. As publishers cotton on to the fact that they can keep the prices high, but reduce their material costs, more and more ebooks will appear. We need to demand better readers, though. eInk and LEPs will move the market forward, increasing battery time and reducing thickness. Given that so many companies can now produce a laptop with larger screens, hard drives, etc for under £200, why do we not have the same leap forward for ebook readers?

I also potential for musicians so that they don’t have to lug around sheet music books. Instead a foot operated pedal could be used to flick the pages back and forth.

The same could also go for technical manuals for, say car mechanics rather than having to look up stuff in those large workshop manuals.

Well yes, I will miss books too, there are hundreds in my Library – I intend to pass on to my children (Whether they like them or not and so they can see what a book once was) – but seriously I’m running out of shelf space – and yeah in my profession I too have to carry around a certain number of books daily – all of which I would love digitised to scan easily for certain info, and I mean both fiction and non fiction. So this little reader is the right way to go for me and for the next generation.

The downloading of digital books that cannot be shared is another matter altogether. This is particularly a problem where you may already have the book, but have to pay again for a digital copy. What I think should happen is that all books should be made available to purchase in digital format by the publisher. If you already own the hard copy of a book, then you should be able to download the book (although, I admit, I have no idea where from or who would provide thie service) by typing in the ISBN number (or similar) of the book and it’s issue, then be asked to supply e.g. the last word on page 47 to verify that you actually have the book. When this has been completed satisfactorily, you should be able to download the book (maybe for a much reduced rate)

Have you looked at the Sony PRS-505 ? It was on the Gadget show last week, and allows you to read pdf’s word document and web content on the device itself. It seems very ergonomic.

As to power usage, since most e-books seem to use technology whereby the device does not use any power when you’re actually reading a page, why not bung a little solar panel on them to recharge the battery ?

Certainly it was expensive, certainly it isn’t perfect – I can’t tell how far it is to the end of the current chapter, I can’t always find a particular book I want in ebook form, or I find that copyright rules don’t allow download to the UK. I charge it about once a fortnight, using it about an hour each day, but last time it still had 30% charge left. I have a spare battery – the battery cover has a tiny fiddly screw, but I cope. It does not look as if it runs on steam, it’s a slim, sleak matt black piece of modern technology in a classy leather cover. The charger is a USB lead that goes into the bottom of a three-pin plug, as well as my PC for transfers. The usual formats I’m offered are Mobipocket, Microsoft and pdf – but my reader will also cope with HTML and plain text. Hardly a format problem, is it?

Yes, I like browsing in bookshops, I still do it. But I can browse ebook sites at home, while drinking coffee and eating a muffin, any time I feel like it – it’s a different, but not dissimilar pleasure. I have discovered old forgotten authors, many books I had never heard of, and would be unlikely to find in a ‘real’ book shop.

The environmental question is not that simple. The environmental impact of the manufacture, delivery and charging of my reader and especially its battery has to be set against that of books.

Ebooks do not have to ‘win’ – they have a place alongside paper. Ebooks prices vary – I always look at the bargain sections first, and about half my downloads have been free. I will still use the local libraries, I will still buy paper books, my ebook reader is a positive addition, but not a replacement.