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Well, it's obviously first-gen. Whether Sony continues to improve it remains to be seen. There have been other eReaders from different makers which have been first-gen which haven't made it to second-gen status.
What we need to do (all of us, not just the members of this group) is to convince content providers to provide more content for the Reader (i.e. current releases of books) so that more people will be tempted to buy the Reader and the content so that Sony will have economic incentive to move to second-gen status with it, which in turn should get more people buying it and the content, which should convince more content providers to expand their offerings.
It's essentially computer hardware so the age old hardware-drives-software/software-drives-hardware see-saw is as true with the Reader as with the Pentium chips.
I have contacted all of my favorite authors who aren't represented at Connect yet to try to convince them to negotiate epublication rights and get into the ebook marketplace.
I urge everybody who reads this to do the same. More current authors will mean more desirability factor to entice new buyers.
And while Sony does have some creative imagination for new products, the bottom line is that it is a megacorporation and what matters most is the corporate bottom line. No matter how wonderful we might know our readers are, if we don't work hard to expand the marketplace for the devices and the content, in another 5 years there will be no Sony Readers to replace our first-gen models. And those authors/publishers who didn't enter the ebook marketplace will have felt justified in remaining out of a dead-end experiment.
Getting these things mentioned on such podcasts as Gibson and Laporte is great -- now to get more such mentions!
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