Last Monday, I received my Cybook Gen3; a dedicated e-ink ebook reading device. I ordered it from booksonboard.com and have yet to use the $50 in free books they're throwing my way. I have such a back log of ebooks I want to read and plenty more from feedbooks.com and gutenberg to keep me busy for a while. I'm also getting quite a few free books from Tor and EOS (Harper Collins) in their big Sci-Fi ebook push. My experience with it so far:

• It took a long time to charge on Monday, but it's been running strong all week. It's at 40% today, a whole week later, and I decided to just go ahead and charge it again.
• Since you can add your own fonts, I added in a nice Baskerville variant called Baskervald. As long as you have the whole font family, it handles bold and italics just fine. I have the font size set for about 18 to 20 lines of text on the screen. Due to the resolution, you need a font with a strong line, and Baskervald works great for that.
• The resolution is not all that wonderful. It's effectively 800x600, but the text does look a little ragged and thin lines seem to disappear. I assume this will get better with future iterations, but it's something to keep in mind if you want to buy a current Gen3. I assume this is true for all other readers (Kindle, Sony) since they all use the same type screen.
• 256MB of memory holds a lot of books. I had a spare 256MB SD card and I find it easy to throw it in into my computer, transfer files and pop it back into the Gen3. It makes the wireless Kindle whispernet seem not all that important since I'll always have a huge number of books on this thing for when I go traveling.
• The value of any book is gone if you can't get lost in the story. So, can I get lost in the story on an electronic reader? The answer has been yes, and a lot easier than with a paper book. This sort of surprised me. The reading experience is very smooth and I can read and turn pages a lot quicker. I'm noticing now how slow it is to turn pages with a paper book; licking fingers, getting a hold of the page, making sure I didn't grab two pages by accident. It sounds petty, but after 100 to 200 pages turns, it adds up. It also keeps your mind in the story. I have had hangups with the page turns, like needing to push the button twice for a page turn, but overall it's been a lot better.
• The dictionary lookup feature is something I've always wanted in a reader. If I see a word I don't know (happens more than I care to admit) I can highlight it and look it up in an installed dictionary. There aren't many free dictionaries out there yet, but I'm hoping to write some scripts that'll convert a Wiktionary dump into a usable mobipocket dictionary. My current dictionary is from 1913, so this should be an improvement.

Overall, I'm very happy with this purchase. This week alone, I read Printcrime and After the Siege by Cory Doctorow, My Own Kind of Freedom (Great book!) by Stephen Brust, Old Man's War by John Scalzi, and even moved 1040 instructions to it so I wouldn't have to print them out to do my taxes. I also save HTML files from blogs or articles online and throw them on the SD card to read when I get a chance.

To say that this device has already paid for itself would be ... well, a lie. It hasn't yet and it would be a tough call for me to recommend it. I think that if I keep and use it for a couple years that will certainly be worth it, but not quite yet.

I also know that a lot of people are aghast at why anyone would get one of these. One of these people is Cory Doctorow, as a matter of fact, in his article Why hardware ebook readers are a dead end. I think he's right in that these devices aren't mass market and probably never will be, but I for one will not read a book on a small, back-lit, mobile phone screen. I need a greyscale, low contrast, non-back lit screen to read off of, as much like paper as possible. I look at LCD screens all day and I know that, for me, it just won't cut it as a reading device (except the XO laptop in greyscale mode).

eBook readers will thrive if it's kept as a small market hardware device and geared towards people that read a ton like I do. I plan on having a device like this from now on and a company that understands that and keeps it open, flexible, and convenient will win out in the end.

I have been seriously thinking about buying a Kindle recently after hearing a lot of good reviews from people's blogs. I've been looking at buying an eInk device of some sort for over two years now. I read a lot and have a lot of PDFs, text files and more that I reference and read all the time. I also love public domain books and there are a lot of classics that I really want to read that I've never really gotten around to; Alice in Wonderland, Scaramouche, Walden, etc. I hate reading on an LCD screen. I usually can't keep it up for more than an hour and my reading speed is drastically cut while doing it.

I'm fascinated by the future of books and the reading experience. First, books shouldn't die. If libraries were to disappear, I think that would be the biggest tragedy in the world. But are they really the be all, end all? Of course not. For casual reading (you'll only read it once), newspapers and periodicals, digital is the way to go. You're not wasting paper or money making something that is basically not wanted. All you really want out of these types of reading material is the reading part, not the material. I will always have a copy of The Princess Bride around as a book because, dear god, it's important. But the New York Times? I'm not going to want that tomorrow let alone in a year. Put it in a digital document, archive it for future generations and save some damn trees.

So anyway, I put an order in for a Kindle a couple days ago. I knew that it wouldn't ship for about another month due to back orders, so I'd be able to think about it more before I was "committed".

Last night, I canceled that order for two reasons; DRM and vendor lock in. I moved away from Apple because they do it and I won't support anyone else doing it. Here's why:

• The device is designed for lock in

  I don't tolerate vendor lock in and the Kindle was designed for it. If you buy a Kindle, the only ebooks you'll be able to use are the ones from Amazon's store. If you buy ebooks from Amazon's store, you can only use them on the Kindle. That's worse lock in than Apple. At least with them, I can buy mp3s from Amazon to load on my iPod (although I'm stuck using iTunes). Many would say that this is for convenience, but there are already good DRM schemes out there that work on a lot of different devices, like Mobipocket. In fact, Amazon owns Mobipocket but still came up with a way to prevent you from buying an ebook on Amazon's site and using it on any device you want. This kind of lock in just to make a buck sucks and ...

• It's not future proof

  What happens in three years when you want to upgrade your ebook device and there's a cool new one out that's not a Kindle? You lose all your books if you move. Since the Kindle is the only device that uses the Kindle format books, then you have to buy a Kindle if you want to keep your books. If you're the kind of person that loves books, this could easily be in the hundreds of dollars lost. Gone and no way to get it back.

  Since publishers won't do ebooks without DRM, the key is to stick with a DRM scheme that is compatible across multiple platforms. That scheme right now is Mobipocket and it's a scheme that the Kindle doesn't support. That means that any books you buy through Amazon for the Kindle would be lost in a move to a newer device and you can only buy books through Amazon for the Kindle (unless it's not DRMed).

  I have no doubt that the DRM will eventually be cracked, but I really don't want to bet money on it. At least with the iTunes music store, I was able to burn and then rip from CD to get my music moved to my Linux laptop, but I can't guarantee that for ebooks.

• Kindle is a spyware device

  The Kindle's terms and conditions clearly lays out how the Kindle is a spyware device.

  The Device Software will provide Amazon with data about your Device and its interaction with the Service (such as available memory, up-time, log files and signal strength) and information related to the content on your Device and your use of it (such as automatic bookmarking of the last page read and content deletions from the Device).

  Is that really information I want them to have? Also, every document but .txt and .mobi files need to go through Amazon in order to convert them and they get stored on their server for, from what I can tell, ever. What if I want to review business documents or documents under and NDA? Amazon will have access to it all and I'm not comfortable with this. Apple's iPhone has similar language and I don't like the direction that takes us.

  I'm also pissed about this.

  Termination. Your rights under this Agreement will automatically terminate without notice from Amazon if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement. In case of such termination, you must cease all use of the Software and Amazon may immediately revoke your access to the Service or to Digital Content without notice to you and without refund of any fees. Amazon's failure to insist upon or enforce your strict compliance with this Agreement will not constitute a waiver of any of its rights.

  In essence, you don't own the device, Amazon owns it and decides what you can do with it when. Frankly, that's fucked up.

It's disappointing that Amazon starts selling DRM-free MP3s and then do an about face and create a super restrictive DRMed ebook reader like the Kindle. They could have done so much better and really made a difference in this market.

I've been moving more towards open hardware now that I've been burned by a couple of these devices (iPod being the major one). The OSD has been outstanding and has totally changed how I watch TV. I've been using Linux for all of my personal computers now and, while it takes some work, I've been very happy with it and am amazed at what I can do without stupid proprietary stuff getting in the way.

The big losses going this route? Convenience and cost. I'm going to buy another ebook reader that also costs $399 but doesn't have any kind of wireless or ability to buy books from the device. I'm willing to pay that though to support companies who are doing the "right thing". I'll let you know how that goes.