I have been following e-ink for a while - my main desire is to read pdfs of scientific papers. When I was a graduate student I used to spend hours in the library, photocopying papers, carrying them home and reading them, and then filing them - I still have a few meters of such papers in my office... Although I hardly ever touch them, I am reluctant to throw them out because I may need to refer to some, and they are not necessarily available electronically.
Nowadays the scientific literature exists as pdfs, and we can get most free via our university libraries, and so they accumulate on the computer. Now the dilemma is print to read, or read on the computer. I do alot of reading when traveling, and over the last few years getting the laptop open in crowded planes with a reclined passenge in front has become nigh impossible. At the same time I hate to print - environment, and ink is expensive. So I would love to be able to carry 1 gb of papers in a dedicated reader to pull out on the plane and read. I would love to take such a device to meetings as well, with abstracts on it, and the ability to annotate is enticing.
Part of me would also love to put books on it, but this is secondary for me. I read few bestsellers, being more into history and non-fiction, or classics, and so am worried that while the Kings, Browns and Grishams would be available that this would do little for me. I used to have a Rocket ebook and was very sad to see the lack of follow up from publishing - so I am shy about the Sony (DRM aside - also not a plus).
In the end the Iliad's larger screen, and slightly more greyscale and annotation features is the deciding factor for me. I am not sure that having that in a flexible paper format is a huge advantage - I can hold a 'hard back'.
So ... I will wait for the Iliad. It is alot of clams, admittedly, but I have a round birthday coming up (don't ask) and so that is my justification...
