[quercle]

Hey all,

I'm new to the forums, and you guys seem to be a fantastic resource.

I've been considering buying an ebook reader recently, because I haven't been reading much in the last five years and I'd like to get back into it (but don't have libraries in walking distance).

I'm wondering about availability in Canada, though -- I gather that the Kindle 2 isn't a good choice (even if it were available, I'm not sure I'd be too into it, since it seems that Amazon's support for formats not their own is sketchy). The Sony PRS-505, Cybook Gen3, and Bebook, and Foxit eSlick are the ones I'm considering right now.

From what I can find, the Sony seems to be about $340 from Dell.ca or Sony, I can buy the Cybook at Archambault for $350, and the Bebook is available at their website for $279 USD + $15 shipping. Are there any other important places to buy any of these three readers that I've missed? Also, I gather that there are other Hanlin clones, which I'd like as much as the Bebook -- are there any places which sell them at similar (possibly cheaper?) prices, and ship to Canada?

Some other considerations... I find the Bebook really interesting because of the open source firmware OpenInkpot which I'd like to hack on a bit. Sony seems like it is the opposite - the Sony store says that you have to use their own software to buy anything from them, which is pretty icky. If the eSlick has really good PDF support, that would be interesting too, but I'm having trouble finding reviews (perhaps nobody has one yet?).

I'm mostly interested in reading free books (since the the idea of possibly paying more than the price of a "real" book for an ebook turns me off), so PDF support is pretty important. One with PDF reflow (and/or the ability to read PDFs in half-pages in landscape mode) would also be nice, since I spend a lot of time reading large PDFs (textbooks, journal articles, etc.). I realise that the screen on all of them is too small to really read PDFs properly, though, so this isn't too big of a deal -- the main purpose of it would be to read fiction. I'd be curious to know which reader has the best PDF support, though.

I'm also wondering about text files (eg from Project Gutenberg) -- do ebook readers typically format text files reasonably nicely?

Thanks for reading & I'd appreciate any suggestions/recommendations you have =).