For some days now I have been gripped by a periodic technology mania: the eternal search for an adequate electronic book reading device. I am one of the early adopters who got stuck with an original Rocket eBook . The device is rather representative for the problems that plague the beautiful idea to built an electronic reading device. Let me list the main problems:

First, No native PDF support. You need to work with some Windows conversion software that often does not produce usefull results, and is not available for Mac

Second, Main focus of development has been on the Digital Rights Management. Mindless VCs and/or the price of production forced the manufacturer to look for revenue from the sale of massively copyright-enforceded commercial ebooks.

Third, High price. As long as the hardware does not get so cheap, that you can easily keep half a dozend eBooks around, without spending a fortune, it is too high.

Fourth, Power consumption. An eBook must have enough battery for at least a week of heavy daily use, otherwise it is too limited.

Now, it looks like finally there is progress. Apparently a chinese company has developed something that looks like the interesting and nicely hackable Sony Librie . The thing is called Jinke V8 and seems to be based on Linux (like the Librie). It is also (like the Librie) based on the only technology currently commercially avaible that could be called “electronic paper”, eInk . Currently, the website says that PDF is only supported through a file convertert to a device internal format. I hope they will understand the necessity of native PDF support… In other good news, eInk seems to either have been taken over by or exclusively licensing to Prime View International , a taiwanese display manufacturer, so production costs should go down rather fast now. More digital paper gossip is here .

One company that has already seen the light in terms of PDF support is Bookeen. Their Windows CE based product Cybook seems to have a native PDF viewer on Beta test. It can also be expanded with wirelesse networking (via PCMCIA card).

The product that I find closest to my wishes, except for the display technology, is the Toshiba DCT-100 , also known as SD-Book . Unfortunatelly it is only available in japanese and I havent found a hacker forum for the device that does a translation of the device (as happened with the Sony Librie). The price and dual-faced configuration is getting into the right direction.

Now if someone could just put the eInk technology or a equally nice competing product into a two-faced pocket book, forget to put in any nasty DRM and add native PDF support that would be nice. And, as already mentioned , I think Apple should do it and get us a nice and well designed document management application in the spirit of iTunes for Documents. iDoc would be a nice name… More realistic is that we will see the first affordable products from China, Korea or Japan.

Reducing the number of trees that get paperized seems to be a worthy cause for engineering progress, lets hope we will see the second eBook wave soon…