[tmoody]

I imagine the regulars get very tired of these posts, but here goes anyway.

I'm certain I don't want to spend more than $300 on a device.

For work-related purposes, I'd like to be able to read recent works in philosophy from publishers such as Oxford and MIT Press. Initially, I didn't find much in Amazon's Kindle store, but I kept browsing and came up with a reasonable number of titles. That's encouraging. I'd also like to be able to read PDF journal articles. From what I've read here, this is a crap shoot on most readers, and certainly on the K2 and Sony 505, which are my main contenders. But at least philosophy articles aren't usually too encumbered with weird graphics, so maybe it's not so bad. As I understand it, I have to get these articles through JSTOR or wherever, and then send them to Amazon for conversion, and hope for the best.

For contemporary philosophy, I don't know if other ebook providers have more content than Amazon, so that's a question mark.

For non-work reading, I read a fair amount of non-fiction: science popularizations, cognitive science, and so on. And I read my share of mass-market fiction.

For the philosophy stuff, and the other non-fiction, I like to be able to highlight/underline, and to search for phrases and words. In fact, it surprises me that some of the devices, such as the 505, don't support searching. I thought the ability to search was one of the main advantages of the whole digitalization of the universe in the first place.

Given all that I've said so far, the wind now seems to be blowing in the direction of the K2.

Aesthetically, I like the 505. It's compact and uncluttered. Although I've only seen photos of the K2, the keyboard is a bit off-putting. I know I'm not the first to have that impression. And obviously I can't really have the annotation feature without a keyboard, except with a touch screen, which I don't like at all.

One thing that I like about the 505 is the possibility of signing up with lending libraries. I gather this doesn't work with the K2, although I'm not sure about that.

The K2 whispernet feature for OTA book acquisition doesn't mean that much to me. But then, I'm one of those knuckleheads who says that, and then ends up using it all the time.

I don't have an iPhone, and no plans to get one, so iPhone sync doesn't float my boat. I do have a Blackberry, and I have a Shortcovers account, as well as a B&N account (and reader). Reading on the BB with large font isn't as deadly as I expected it to be, but it's still not something I expect to do a lot of.

So...if I add up the considerations so far, I should probably get the K2. But I'll give it another day or two of rumination.

Todd