[menudoBandit]

Apologies if this is NOT the proper forum for this question. If not, kindly point me in the right direction as there is a TON of stuff on MobileRead.

I love what Gideon is trying to accomplish here and have been desperately searching for something like it. Background: I am very new to readers and have been playing around with my first - which happens to be a Kindle2 - for a couple of weeks. I just received the PRS-300 I ordered and have had a little time to play with it. At this time I am not concerned with the device nuances; I can uncover those fine for myself over the next couple of weeks.

I am a largely mainstream fiction reader. I love grabbing new releases when they come available and not paying a king's ransom for them. This makes Amazon particularly attractive, as they seem very competitively priced and seem to have the majority of eBooks I am interested in available for purchase.

That said, however, I like what the latest Sony readers (and many others) are trying to accomplish in adopting support for open standards. My quandary is this: I need something that will either support both DRM and open (like ePub, RTF, TXT, PDF, etc). I would like the ability to not anchor myself to a Kindle but still have the ability to buy and read books from Amazon and other mainstream etailers. I would prefer to keep the PRS300 because it at least offers more options in formats, but still supports DRM...but I love the Amazon store and it's associated pricing.

I can see what corporate giants like B&N, Amazon etc are trying to do and it sucks. I've looked at some of the non-mainstream readers like the Hanlin devices and while I love the feature-set, the inability to read DRM content - and thereby purchase fresh-released, mainstream (affordable) works is a deal killer for me.

So the only options I see are these right now:
1.) Keep the Kindle and read Free (Gutenberg, non-mainstream) books or buy DRM/Kindle-proprietary Amazon works.

2.) Keep the Sony and buy DRM books from Sony at a higher cost, along with other 3rd-party eBook sellers at an even higher cost.

3.)?

Once again I apologize if this is not the proper forum for this and thanks to all in advance who would try to correct my ignorance here.