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.