[Harmon]

Well, I have a 505 and a mac, yet. So I just spent the evening at my neighbor's place, using his pc to get my 505 authorized for Adobe DE. Not a pleasant task - he's running some ancient version of windows and things kept crashing or not even booting up. But eventually I got my 505 authorized, and figured out that on my mac, in order to read ADEs, I have to download them into the Digital Editions program, which evidently converts the books to something that my authorized 505 will read if I drag them to the device. Very kludgy. But I do like the 505 and it gives me the latitude to read things that would be difficult if not impossible to get on the Kindle.

But the Kindle is going to win out in the States, and anywhere else it is sold, and here's the reason: my neighbor is interested in maybe getting an eBook reader, but he's not going to screw around with the Sony Library, or Digital Editions. What he wants is a simple purchasing experience. He will get that with Amazon & the Kindle, because all he has to do is go on Amazon, buy the book & whammo! it's on his Kindle. In fact, he doesn't even need a computer to buy books, once he has the Kindle and an Amazon account. He will not get that experience on the Sony.

Sony is a stick shift. Kindle is an automatic. So...a stick is more fun to drive, IMHO, but you don't see a whole lot of them around.

I think that there are many more people like my neighbor who will be willing to buy a Kindle because of the no-brainer way getting books on it works.