I was about to rant a little, but
da jane said most of what I was going to say.
People keep talking about the evils of a "backlight", but that is not what is needed, it is simply a "built-in" light.
For $350, people do not expect to have buy extra things, and aside from the financial aspect of it, they especially do not want to have a temporary, improvised light hanging off the thing that may not transport in the same case. I also do not want to have to change the batteries of a book light, or to have to carry a spare set of batteries for it (which would be 4 batteries for the light referred to in the post above).
I can guarantee that the reason there is not a built-in light is hysteria over "battery life". This is really foolish as people expect to put their cell phone and/or PDA in a charger every night, not to mention plugging in their laptop. As long as the battery lasts a full day or two of use, that's enough.
We are talking one LED bulb, after all - no engineering needed. Every IBM Thinkpad laptop for the last 6 years has had an LED bulb bult-in to the top of the LCD panel that shines on the keyboard for use in dark situations. It works great and barely affects the battery life.
PS I have not seen an e-ink display yet, but a review of the Sony Reader claims that it is gray rather than white, and that lack of contrast, combined with the ghosting (however toned down) makes the e-ink display still not ready for "prime time".
Irregardless of that, I think that the only question to be answered in the future is whether a second generation Sony Reader will be produced that a) corrects the criticisms, and b) has a list price of $199 or less.
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the quality of the book reading experience will trump them all.
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But how many people will ever see the Sony Reader screen ?
The other problem is that it seems likely that the concept of reading a full length book will gradually fade out before books go digital. It came to my attention recently that many high schoolers skim books - even pleasure reading like Harry Potter - rather than read every word cover to cover. It's not an exagerrated cliche to say that the world is now a place of short attention spans and flash over substance.
If I had to predict, I would say that in 15 years, an author will be someone who writes for a online magazine.
As such, a second generation Nokia 770 with a faster processor and more memory may be more successful even than a second generation Sony Reader.