[Kumabjorn]

Originally Posted by emellaich

I remember Sony's first ereader. Picture a clamshell form factor. You can see it here:
http://www.sony.net/Fun/design/histo...1990/dd-1.html

Although, I am a bit confused. It claims to be from 1990, and I could swear that I first saw it about 1987.

I have one of those. You might be right, because I think they released it outside Japan first since there were no titles available for the Japanese market. Publishers were worried that they would be pirated (see how long that history is) and they were right, once titles (mainly reference) were released it took less then 6 months for an EPWing emulator to appear on PCs, but HDD were still not big enough to hold more than a single title (if you also wanted to have applications and data on it). Piracy was simply stiffled by available disk space.
You could hook up the DD-1 to a PC but it was sooo sloooow it was useless.