More cybook
So the device is actually quite usable in bed. There's not quite the contrast you get on normal paper (the background is greyer; maybe like early 90s cheap recycled paper) and in exactly the wrong spot you can get reflection off the display. But mostly it's fine. I found myself spending more time with both hands on the pad while laying on my side, but there was no stress and it worked out quite well.

The slow page refresh and flashing between pages isn't optimal. I'm a relatively fast reader and the slow page turns (which happen more frequently than with dead trees) and apparent control key issues I mentioned in my previous entry can be slightly annoying. A slower reader might not notice. A very fast reader, such as Tori, might not like it. Her speed would drop because she'd be spending more relative time waiting for the page refresh.

And now what may be a bad bug. I loaded 161 ebooks onto the 2Gb SD card. I had these in a hierarchical structure, so the book I'm reading is /...path.to.SD.../eBooks/Weber,David/Saganami/Shadow_of_Saganami.prc which appears OK in the library (however, also see earlier post about scalability of the library interface). BUT... when the machine powers down, on reboot it forgets what page I was on. Once or twice it remembered, but most frequently it started again at the front page.

For that bug and the slowness of rebooting with so many books and the library interface issue, I've actually stopped using the SD card and copied a subset of the books into the internal flash. Not ideal, but it seems to solve both problems. I'm a "everything" person; I like to have my whole "stuff" with me, so a large iPod for all of my CDs; a large memory card for all of my eBooks. Fortunately I think I'm less likely to want to pick a book at random than a CD, so I might be able to survive with just the internal flash.

One thing I've not been able to work out... when to charge this thing. About the only time I don't want to have the device close to me as a book is when I'm at work. In theory overnight, but I want it bedside to read in bed, and I don't want to have power cables trailing around in my bedroom. So maybe I'll actually charge it at work once a week (or however often it needs a charge).

Tomorrow is my first day of using it while commuting.