[fjtorres]

Book launch time is dependent on the book, as pointed out.

For really long books, the PB360 will warn you it will be a while so you don't think the system is hung up.

In general, most all books open up in seconds (as in, less than a minute), usually 10-15, and while no scientific study has been published, most reports have the PB360 among the fastest in the industry *today*. My own experience, FWIW, is that the same books that are slow to open on PB360 are about as slow on my dual-core Athlon Tablet PC (2.2GHz).

It's all about balance: between cost, battery life, and performance.
Most current readers use comparable CPUs and the ones known to have faster CPUs (which reduces battery-life, btw) rely on an architecture and software seems to eat away at that extra capability so they end up no faster.

Performance on today's ereaders isn't much of an issue because 99% of the time spent on them is spent reading, not booting, opening files, or even paging (unless you're using a really large font size). And the "flash-to-black" stops being an issue fairly fast simply because they are a very immersive reading medium; you're drawn into the story and lose track of the mechanics of the pagin process.

These are not things that can be experienced in a 30 second video or even a ten-minute store test drive. They do manifest within an hour or two of straight usage, though, which is why most new-owner testimonials sound positive from day one.

In general, I would suggest that page turn experience and book opening speed are *not* likely discrimnators between brands/models of eink readers. Software stability, book presentation options, and supported formats, as well as hardware design (ergonomics, build quality, etc) *are*. If the "flash-to-black" or book opening speed are issues of paramount importance to you, then you likely should be looking to other reading tech, probably a slate-format Tablet PC from Viliv, Archos, HP, etc.