[sonyreaderfan]

Hmm, if price is a consideration foremost, then get the Kobo.

But for me, Kobo's a nonstarter because

- It doesn't have a search function. The lack of this is deal breaker because I read mostly nonfiction and need to search for subject words in the text. You can't do that in Kobo.
- No dictionary or highlight on sideloaded books. Most of the books in my library are sideloaded books (pdfs, epubs from 3rd party).

There are speculation that a beta firmware will fix this, but why wait.

- This is an issue that annoys me personally. From reading the forum, Kobo's firmware is buggy. There are bug reports that Kobo doesn't always access footnotes, weird justification, etc. (Just look in the Kobo forum for all the bugs reported.) Once again, there is report that some future firmware will fix the bugs. But really, my view is that the customers shouldn't be working as a product tester and reporting bugs to the MR forum, and having Kobo reps responding to it. (I owned a K3 and Sony and never encountered bugs on the device. The Sony Library software is another story.) Some people say having this response is a strong point of Kobo, but I just want a device to work out of the box.

Strong points of Sony over Kobo
- Very fast operation. I can read comics in it (using the picture viewer app to go through folder of jpegs) and large pdf files and the operation is pretty smooth
- Better pdf support
- Collections

Strong points of Kobo over Sony
- Price
- Can have your own fonts, control over line spacing.
(But you can have your own fonts with PRS+ firmware for Sony.)
- Lots of firmware updates. (But I don't see this as a plus, necessarily, if it's because the firmware needs a lot of bug fixing to being with.)
- Reading Life?

What about a Kindle? It's cheap and bug free and the ebookstore is cheaper than Kobo's. Is it selling in Australia? If touchscreen is what you want, in September Amazon will release a touchscreen Kindle, while older ones will mostly drop below US $100.