[macastronomer]

I appreciate your comments (everybody).

I received this through Sony Rewards and they are going to send me a new one as soon as they get some in (with of course an RMA of this one). I'm glad I'm not out in the cold here, which is where Sony would otherwise leave me. The trick to this fix, however, is the fact that I had only had it for a few days.

Does anybody here remember people who had Palm III Palm pilots? If you caused any exertion on those at all, the screen would break and Palm did NOT cover them. I know of 4 individuals who had those and all of them ended up with internal screen breakage. I never had one of those, I had a Palm V at the time and it was extremely rugged. I've had many more palms and now have a Palm TX. Never had a problem. There was definitely a problem with the Palm IIIs and was never legitimately acknowledged by Palm. This almost seems the case with the Sony Reader. What I find astonishing is the number of people here who have put their Reader through the hoops and it has survived.

As a note to some of the posts above...

As per a friend of mine, you need to contact your insurance agent and get the details regarding home insurance because they will up your insurance and they won't necessarily tell you that unless you ask specifically. That IS ridiculous, because you'd think, "What have I been paying for all this time?!"

As per Sony knowing whether or not it was mistreated... they don't care. Itr is a "Limited Waranty" (which in some states is not legal and they need to cover it anyway. I don't know which states those are). Their policy says, "if the screen is damaged, we don't cover it". Keep in mind, there is no outside damage to my Reader. It is out of the box new on all surfaces. As I look at the defect, the screen is internally cracked (I didn't recognize that initially) on the top left corner only. It affects the screen all the way down vertically, but the crack is small, thin and only crosses the corner.

Seeing that it is a hairline crack (let me reiterate—internally only), the internal glass looks extremely thin. If that glass has any stress what-so-ever, it will break very easily. I would be very careful with your Readers. I still don't think it should break if it is in there properly without exerting some sort of G-force to it. A twisted unit might break the glass but that would seem to crack the middle of the screen all the way across or diagonally (not a tiny corner).

The outside seems very strong (glass, plastic, metal and all). It flabbergasts me that it could break, inside, on such a small scale, and without an incredible force unless it was either assembled incorrectly (causing undue stress on the glass) or if the glass is extremely fragile (seems unlikely due to the other messages posted here).

Sorry to go on, but I only want to fill in some details and stress my sincerity about this issue.

MA