Back some years ago on a rather too slow passage from the Canaries to Martinique, I was much more concerned about the possibility of running out of reading material rather than water which was also in somewhat short supply...
Which brings me in a roundabout way to E-Readers and electronic books. Since it is also coming on to the season of gift giving (or in my case the season of shameless pandering and dropping hints), what better time to go down my shortlist of e-readers I would not mind finding in the big sock nailed to the bulkhead?
Of course, everybody knows about the Kindle and as prices drop they do seem to get better and better but I'd prefer something that was more of a system neutral reader that would allow me to trade e-books with some guy I happen to meet in a Chilean fjord. The idea that we'd have incompatible systems would be some kind of tragic!
Right now the one most interesting to me in form factor and size is the Ectaco Jetbook Mini and, as I've heard a lot of very nice things about the slightly larger Jetbook Lite, it would seem that Ectaco might have its act together and knows what it is doing.
The wild cards at the moment in my quest are the Augen and Skytex which both come highly recommended and reviewed. That said, they don't quite grab me the way the Jetbook Mini does... Simple and small is no bad mantra...
But who knows? I'm (as you all know) way too cheap to spend that kind of money on something that is not a guitar, camera, tool or boat part, so I'm just putting this out there in case there really is a Santa and he is able to get past the TSA junk fondlers in one piece with a bag full of e-readers...
