I'm not sure if I agree about the first point, about the dual screen format - the majority of books only use a two page format because it'd be criminal not to print on the back of a page aswell. we only read one page at a time. However, there is, or shortly will be, a dual screen reader on the market in the form of the iRiver eBook (an here's hoping they come up with a more original name). as for underlining and making notes, honestly it would be a nice feature, but I can't remember the last time I wrote anything on any book of mine - it only damages them for a temporary payoff. obviously digital underlining would be different though. in fact, it could cater for all sorts of digital extensions of note taking, such as searching through notes, or extracting them and relative passages into a separate file for later perusing. <BR><BR>I agree overall, that ebooks are a long way off from being a true replacement to books, but I have my own reasons. <BR><BR>1. Price. I haven't seen one for less than $280, for which I could buy an 80Gb ipod and still have change left over for a box full of second hand books. <BR><BR>2. Format support. Its a difficult one to get right, but none of the ebooks so far have done PDF support right. This is mainly due to the low resolution of most of the units (800x600 average) which also makes the text less sharp than a book.<BR><BR>3. Style. The sony reader is ugly. as is iliad. and the bookeen. and don't even get me started on the kindle. The iriver one is the only stylish looking one so far. <BR><BR>Lastly, a bit of common sense. Here are a few things that wouldn't go astray on an ebook: <BR><BR>Add Basic Internet Support: <BR>reading rss feeds or emails that don't need to by 'synchronised' from my pc 'converted' by a third party. Amazon wants me to pay them for content that someone else provides for free. if my phone can handle the web, this thing surely can. <BR><BR>Add a few other apps: <BR>a calender or personal organiser would be nice. these started out as paper based systems. why not digital paper?<BR><BR>Stick a solar panel on the back:<BR>we're all trying to save the planet, right? aside from the dead trees involved, books don't use any energy themselves. And i'd be willing to bet the energy used to manufacture an eBook is an order of magnitude larger than that used to produce the average paperback. They say the batteries last for days on some models. So a trickle charge from even a small photoelectric cell could turn that into weeks, months or even years right?
