The PRS-500 is going to be released pretty soon. I've been looking forward to this for over a year now, ever since I heard about it. Being the kind of guys who have bookshelves in our room full of old volumes that we might reread some day so we keep them around, I imagine this as a way to completely get rid of them. Think about before the iPod, before CDs even, remember when if you wanted to have more than 20 or 30 albums you had a big shelf full of records? (Well, I suppose no one really remembers that because it was appx 5,000 years ago.) Either way, when Sony's new Portable Reader System comes out it'll let anyone carry around all the books they want with them and read them on the go. You might say that ever since palms came out people have been able to do this, but I disagree. A palm pilot is designed for all sorts of crazyness, so its battery won't last very long if you're just reading a book (and of course reading a good book takes hours and hours).
This is where the new excellence is going to come in, using a technology that only makes use of the battery when the page is being turned, it allows you to load a page and leave it on there while you read it (or even leave it on there while you walk away and come back in a few hours). That means that you can turn "7,500 pages" with one battery charge. (The pixels are actually tiny beads that flip between their black or white sides when you load a page.) Either way, I think it's pretty genius. And when you combine this with Project Gutenberg putting out thousands of books in text format after they're copyrights have run out, you can legally read books for the rest of your life without having to pay a cent.
It's supposed to be available "late summer 2006" and it's price will be anywhere from $150 to $350. I couldn't find a real answer to that one. Look at the pics, give it a drool.
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