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Originally Posted by HarryT
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The perfect device for me would be something the size of the HTC Touch, but with a "roll-out" screen for reading on. Perhaps that will arrive in a couple of years.
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They have something like this in Barcelona at the Mobile Congress two or three years ago. It was then black and white only. My reference was on heise.de in the english language mobile news section.
It hasn't caught on yet, though.
I sure hope that it will. In the meantime there are netbooks ... some even with tablet-pc-like displays like the Acer T101H which is announced for this month. IMHO, from the netbooks I have personally seen so far the Toshiba NB-100 has the best display and design.
Having said that let e state that I have never had access to any the dedicated ebook reading devices like Kindle and the like. I do not feel deprived by this as I do not like single-task devices at all.
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I am summarizing my experiences on reading on handheld devices. over the last six years or so. I realize that this might not interest everyone and it going off-topic for this thread. If you are not interested stop reading now
I personally have read the three volumes of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings on a Nokia 3230 formatted plain text files. I am currently on PalmOS using Mobipocket and have used previously Adobe and Plucker this platform.
My best reading experience was with a Palm Zire 72: huge and very clear display but lousy battery stamina. I am currently using a Treo 680 and that is OK.
I have favored Plucker (which is only available on Palm OS) until recently and used Adobe on Palm when I had to. But with XP SP 3 I lost the ability of generating my content for Plucker the way I wished and I started introducing Mobipocket to my reading and contenet creation "arsenal".
Then I had a period of alternatively using either Plucker, Adobe or Mobipocket depending on my existing content format. That got to be too cumbersome for me - I was forever searching content in the wrong reader. Until I blew my top and converted everything to Mobipocket.
None of the ebook readers I have used so far is perfect. But the far worst piece of shit was the Windows desktop component of the Adobe Reader for PalmOS: Slow, a memory hog and with lousy results.
The best overall solution is Mobipocket. There some negatives issues both on the Windows desktop and under PalmOS when one creates his own content and/or has a large number of ebooks under PalmOS - but I either just take the hit or work around issues. I won't go into further details as this is a rather long post already.
One the positive side Mobipocket is the best integrated solution so far I have seen for reading books on mobiles. And I am now on a Mobile-OS-independent ebook platform which supports as of today all the major mobile OS platforms: Symbian, Windows Mobile (in all its variations), PalmOS and Blackberry - all of which is got for me as I am now able to go any way when I finally kick PalmOS out.