[Kleki]

Hi everyone,

I am about to buy my first ebook-reader. I had nearly ordered the Sony 505 when it came out here in Germany last week. But short of doing so I stumbled across this forum and a couple of other devices. Well now, being totally unexperianced with reading devices beyond my laptop I have no clue which one to buy. I hope to get some thoughts from you folks here.

After some reading I narrowed my choice down to the Sony 505, the Cybook and the BeBook (Hanlin) with a slight tendency to the latter two. These were my thoughts so far:

1) The only regular reading on my laptop so far is an html magazine (mostly text). So it would be a good start when the device could support that natively. Will hyperlinks work on those devices?

2) Besides that magazine I expect to mostly read fiction. Around one half will be German books (my native language) and one half English language books with the occasional Swedish one inbetween. Figuring that Mobipocket is the predominant format for Entlish and epub nowadays for German it would probably be a good idea if the device would support both. I guess that speaks for Cybook or Bebook. Not sure about DRM, though. If they only support one DRM format I'll be stuck again. Or can you easily convert DRMed books?

3) What about dictionary lookup? I understand it is only possible to use mobipocket dictionaries and to only lookup from within mobipocket files. Is that correct? Is Cybook the only one capable of that? Could you somehow search directly in the dictionary without selecting a word from your current reding?

4) Somewhat related to the previous question. Can I search full text within a normal novel with any of the devices?

5) How is the support of these companies? Any to prefer in respect to regular firmware updates?

6) How is the usability? Sony and Bebook seem to have more buttons. Is that an advantage?

I hope I can get some clues to finally make a choice.

Thanks,
Tobias