Here I am, an old desert rat.

[KlondikeGeoff]

Glad to find these forums. I just got the Reader recently. I'd placed the request to be notified when it was available several months ago, and got the email form Sony in October, so placed an order.

They notified me that it was being shipped early in November. To ship from California to Arizona, took 16 days!

Anyhoo, am delighted to finally receive it. I had the old RCA eBook (later acquired by Gemstar) for years and loved it. Unfortunately, the idiots at Gemstar decided to drop it, so got a whole mess of books before they stopped selling them. Finally read them all, so thought was out of luck until Sony got smart.

I do miss the backlighting and the ability to load any font or type size that is on my computer. Even in the horizontal position, it is hard for me to read, as have vision problems. I fail to see why they can't make that size work in the vertical position and/or make larger type available.

Other things I miss that the Gemstar did was let you "find" any word or phrase, let you "go to..." any chapter or position, click to go to the previous position, regulate the contrast and backlight intensity, see the time and date, see a bar graph to show how much memory was used and free and lookup any word you highlighted to get a definition.

Even so, I'm delighted with the Reader. It is much smaller and lighter, the type is indeed amazing, and the menu navigation is pretty good. I have no trouble with the Connect software (but, hey, I'm an old-time computer geek), and it works just fine. I am a little frustrated by the slow page-turning, but am getting used to hitting the button just as I start the last line.

Now I better shut up and go read some of the forums.

Happy reading.