Today, Fujitsu announced the advent of the first commercial e-ink reader. This thing is much closer to what I’m looking for – I’m holding out from e-ink as yet, though the Cybook seriously tempted me. If I’m going to pay £200, I want color at the very least, and a touchscreen is pretty much on the cards, too. So I’ve been using my pda (Ipaq 4700), Ebookwise and Vye tablet as my main reading devices. 

I’m sold on ebooks, and these days I’ll go for the ebook as my format of preference. My latest trick is changing names – seriously naughty, but if I don’t like a name in a book, I can change it to one I do like! So I don’t have to read any more books where the hero has my son’s name, which tends to squick me out a bit, but since not everyone has a son called Robert, I can hardly complain!

Anyway, back to the ebook reader.

It’s from Fujitsu, is called the FLEPia ebook reader and it has an 8 inch display screen in full color, wifi and bluetooth connectivity and I don’t know about you, but I think it looks good. Nice and clean design. It says it has a 40 hour battery life, but they do tend to exaggerate a bit. Still, half that would still be great. It has an SD card slot, a must for me, because it means I can load books on to the card from my computer and then use it in the machine.  Here’s the company’s press release.

Bad news? It uses .book and XMDF formats, hardly common formats, and it costs (gulp) $1,000. Wonder if they’d let me have one for review purposes? I’d give it a good workout!