Way back in the early or middle 1990's Sony introduced a small, clamshell book reader that used the Sony MD (mini-disc) as the media type. You could buy a book on a MD and play it in the Bookreader (or whatever it was called). It had a non-backlit, monochrome display that displayed the book's text. This far outdates any eBook readers that I know of. Unfortunately, it was expensive, as were the books, and since sales never took off those of us who bought one wound up with a device that only had a few hundred books available for it initially and no new ones after a short period of time. it was typical Sony: cutting edge technology way ahead of its time, but too expensive to be successful. The screens back then were horrible and that helped to kill it as well.

On another note, it is nice to see another ham in this thread. Hi ac4lt de w5jck.