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I'm lazy when it comes to buying stuff -- when possible and conventient I try to get it online. Books are no exception. I've picked up on reading a few years ago, focussing on English books to improve my overall English reading skills. Having read a fair few books since then, I decided to buy an e-book reader late last year.. Mostly because I was quickly running out of space on my bookshelf, and I got a bit tired of dragging around pocket books on every trip: they fill up space.. especially when traveling by plane.

So, I browsed around and finally stuck with the CyBook Gen3, a small and portable ePaper device (and it's damn lightweight!). It has some internal memory which is good for a dozen books, and it can very easily be extended with an SD card. Currently I have a 512 MB one, but I'm contemplating upgrading to 4GB so I'm pretty sure I'll never run out of space again. The obvious advantage is that if you want to drag around a dozen books or so, you don't need an extra backpack. The books are also a little bit cheaper for me, seeing as most English pockets are around 12 euro, whereas I can get them online for around 8 USD. You do the math (it's about a 50% saving though!).

The device is easy on the eyes as well: it uses ePaper, which is a technology that enables the device to render once, never having to refresh the screen (which is done in monitors, TVs, etc.). This also means it uses very little power.. which I definitely noticable. I haven't really recharged the battery since I got it, besides a few minutes from time to time to put a new book on the SD card (yeah yeah, I didn't have an SD card reader on my old laptop).

So if you like reading, and don't mind using a device rather than having the "real deal" in your hands, definitely check it out :-)... You need to be willing to fork over some money for it though, most e-book readers go for around 300-400 USD. Ouch.

Sometimes I can get very annoyed at the short sightedness of people. This time it is about the constant bickering when Microsoft ships a cool new product (be it software or hardware, but mostly hardware) that a different company ("preferably" either Google or Apple) has done it all before. However, most of the time the product by the other company isn't around that long (say, a couple of weeks, maybe a month or so at most). One of the most heard complaints is: "Microsoft probably copied this from company Y, again."

A great example of this is the Zune v2 with touch screen (versus the iPod Touch and iPhone). Okay, seriously, reality check here. How long do you think it takes to design, manufacture, write software for, and ship a product like the Zune v2 with touch screen? Certainly not the small amount of time between the release of iPod Touch and the announcement of the Zune v2. Yes, there were rumours, but not for very long befor Apple announced its products. Then tell me how Microsoft could have possibly copied this "idea" (which has been around for ages ayway, so Apple isn't very innovative, either!) in the space of maybe a month or two?

Yeah, Microsoft has copied some ideas from other companies in the past. It is not like Apple or Google (or IBM, or Sony, or ...) ever borrowed ideas from someone else. If it's a good idea and it sticks, then why not use it (or something similar)?

Another often-heard complain is "Finally, Microsoft gets it", usually after a product announcement. Huh, say what? You don't think Microsoft has enthusiastic and smart people who get it? Of course it does! But obviously designing a product (sometimes from scratch), getting all ideas worked out, etc. etc., take a lot of time (and, granted, there is some office politics to be done as well). Microsoft got it, the teams and people got it -- just because there isn't currently a product that makes use of <insert hip technology here> doesn't mean they aren't working on it.

[EOB].