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Yesterday I was asked twice about my Cybook: once while waiting for my train, which was late, at the station, I sat on a bench reading and a woman sat next to me and asked me if I liked it. I went into my ebook evangelization spiel, and learned that she was most familiar with the Kindle, but didn't say "Is that a Kindle?" as most people do when asking about it. She said she was holding out for a color screen, but was getting more and more tempted all the time to buy one of the current models.
Then when I actually got on the train, the young man sitting next to me asked about it. He was interested in an ebook reader to read PDFs, which he already owned and read on his laptop (he cheerfully admitted that some were from the darknet, but also said he had bought many of them). I told him about reflow, etc., and then it occurred to me that being a Young Person, he might be interested in graphic novels, so I asked if the books were all text or mostly images, and he said some were graphic novels, but some were text, and particularly those from the darknet were pictures of text--a scan of an actual book, thus not being useful for reflow purposes. I told him wait a few months, and there will probably be a whole bunch of new devices with bigger screens, which would be better for his purposes.
I gave the mobileread.com URL to both of them, too.
I think we're on the brink of an explosion of interest in ebooks and reading devices. Lower prices on the devices will drive this. The next year is going to be very interesting.
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