I’ve been reading e-books since year 2000 when I’ve bought my first PDA: Palm m100. It had a small black and white LCD screen and only 2 Mb of memory, but I was amazed that you can easily store a 1000 page fiction book on that device and it easily fits into your jeans pocket so you can read it anytime you’ve got a spare minute.

After that I had two Pocket PC (HP h2210 and HP hx4700) which gave me more memory, more colors and higher screen resolution. Using them was more pleasant experience, but major drawbacks of PDA’s as e-book reader such as small screen (4 inches on HP hx4700) and almost unusable LCD screen at bright sunlight (which is a common occurrence in Sydney) remained unchanged.

Finally my search for better alternatives to PDA lead me to Irex Iliad e-book reader. This device has relatively large 8 inch electronic ink display with 1024×768 screen resolution with 16 levels of gray and you can read it in bright daylight just like any paper book. You can open PDF and HTML files from Compact Flash or Secure Digital card or USB flash drive.

I was using my Iliad since December 2006 on daily basis and I’m quite happy with this device. Reading experience much better compared with PDA, you can carry 1000′s of books and it saves trees in the forest. The biggest downside so far is a short battery time (around 7 hours) and popular formats such as CHM and RTF are not yet suppored by preinstalled software. Also device can’t be put into standby mode like PDA and it takes around 40 seconds to turn on the device.

Around ten people at the coffee places and train, where I’m usually reading with my Iliad, asked me what kind of device is it and where it could be bought, so I think there is a large potential demand for such product.

Currently there are two e-book reader devices available for purchase:

• Irex Iliad for EUR 650 from https://www.irexshop.com/
• Sony Reader for US$349.99 from Sony Style (US only) or from resellers on eBay for higher price