OK, I have a little problem with gadgets. I love them a little too much. It gets expensive.
And I have my eye on yet another one: the new Sony Portable Reader System (May I say what a goofy-ass product name that is. Am I going to become more portable if I purchase this product?)
It's not that I want to read books on the thing. I'm very fond of analog, paper-based books. I judge books by their cover. I buy them. I beat them up. I read them in the bathtub. Not a good thing to do with an ebook reader.
But I also have an electronic subscription to the New Republic that I'm barely using. I get notified each week that there's a shiny new PDF of that week's issue to download. What am I supposed to do with it? Read it on my laptop? I hate reading PDFs or long documents on my computer. Print it out? And waste dozens of pieces of paper on something I'll toss out (OK, recycle in a few days?) It makes no sense.
But put a nice, sharp readable PDF on something like this Reader, I might actually get around to it. I could read it on BART. I wouldn't have paper piling up everywhere. I would print less stuff and finish reading more articles.
Then again, it is Sony we're talking about. They could manage to cock this new product up as badly as just about everything else they've done lately.
But we'll see. I'm keeping an eye on it. Anyone actually used one yet?
