i am becoming more and more interested in buying an ebook reader. there are a few brands in the market but none of them is great. i think the eink technology limits them a lot because the ebook readers are not comparable to other consumer electronics in terms of resolution and speed. my guess is they are trying to lower the cost of processing to bring up their profit margins while paying too much on the eink side. on the other hand, resolution seems to be very costly when using the eink on the screen.

amazon's kindle and kindle 2 may seem a better choice than sony readers: prs-700, prs-505, and prs-500 in terms of the number of the available books and kindle 2's internet connectivity through amazon's "free" 3g network. sony on the other hand gives the option of adding external memory to the unit. in addition, prs-700 has a touchscreen that can be used for gesture commands, touchscreen keyboard, and highlighting. this means more screen realstate and more functionality. kindle's design is a lot bulkier than sony's.

kindle's internet connectivity is very tempting. however, amazon's ebook reader does not support open formats such as pdfs which is a shame. therefore the user should convert them to amazon's own format. the irony of the story is that users can use amazon's "email and convert" service which is not free. this is nothing but an attempt to monopolize the ebook market. a novel reader may prefer kindle 2, but for someone like me that reads a lot of technical papers and magazines in pdf format sony reader seems to be a much better match.

there are other choices for ebook readers such as irex. irex has 3 different models with "irex iliad" being the most famous. there is a big disadvantage for irex devices which is their terribly high price.

among the three sony readers prs-700 seems to be the hottest naturally. however, a few people have complained about the low contrast of its screen compared to prs-505. now the question is: do you prefer a black prs-700 with touchscreen and side-lighting to a silver prs-505 with a higher screen contrast which is also a lot cheaper? i am going to figure it out soon.

aside from ebook readers, i looked for a software to easily merge several pdfs into one. this was mainly because there are many free books and newspapers that are split into pdfs, chapter by chapter or page by page. luckily, i found one. it is very fast and very easy to work with: pdfsam short for pdf splitter and merger.