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OK, my design thoughts for the day:
I like the Sony having page turn buttons on both sides of the screen. The single 5-way controller on the Cybook does not thrill me - I'd rather have two extra buttons for page turning on the other side of the device, just so I can read left handed.
The Sony numeric keyboard with 10 buttons down the side for numbers is kinda useful, it beats scrolling with a half-second display refresh. But either more buttons or a better system is needed to get around the "30 lines of text but only 10 buttons" problem with menus. This is the one area where a low-res touch screen has advantages. I would need to play with options to come up with a better system but I am convinced it can be done. Once that is designed a decent library management system can be designed as well as stuff like dictionary lookup and font selection.
My inclination is to scrap the extra buttons and go with a 5-way plus extra page buttons. Use those as part of the menu system as jump/page buttons, allowing the user to scroll (say) 10 lines at a time or single lines using the 5-way. That lets you put a decent amount of detail on the screen for the library but keep it so any option is less than ten key presses away. It might even be useful to let the user choose between a couple of font sizes for the menus so that people like me can have two or three pages of menu on the screen, and others can flip to landscape and have half a page of really, really big menu text.
The goal overall is to add functionality for people who've had the device for a while without making the initial experience too complex. Or do the DSLR trick and have a configuration utility on the computer so people can hack it a bit - use XML config files so the community can build configurators for other operating systems.
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