Check out this short demo of the Plastic Logic reader — it looks pretty slick. It’s going to be a very impressive device within a few years time.

I predict that within 5 years the majority of working professionals will be doing all of their reading on electronic devices — fiction books, newspapers, work memos, training manuals — you name it, it will be done on a device like the Kindle or the Plastic Logic reader. The reasons are clear: it’s easier, less wasteful and more efficient.

Do you think iTunes is the best thing since sliced bread for organizing your music? If so, you might be interested in an article on lifehacker that advocates the use of iTunes for organizing your PDFs too.
iTunes supports PDFs so you can add them to the library and then add them to playlists or filter them using smart playlists, just like you can music. It’s even possible to create multiple libraries with iTunes, so you don’t need to mix up your tax records with your Rage Against the Machine music …

Josh Catone over at Sitepoint takes a look at how digitizing paper is becoming a new cottage industry:
If you’re like me, you have a filing cabinet full of paper. Health insurance forms, utility bills, car service records, tax receipts, etc. It piles up fast and keeping track of it all is something of a pain in the butt. For virtual teams, with employees scattered around the globe, the pain caused by piles of paper can be more pronounced. Over the past year or two, a handful of startups have emerged …

Now about 10 months from its release in mid-to-late November in 2007 — enough time has passed to see what people really think of Amazon’s Kindle.
For those who haven’t owned one, used one, or otherwise seen one – you can find a floating copy of the original introduction video here on YouTube - The Amazon Kindle.
I’ve read through a slew of reviews ranging from the unimpressed, well-thought out response of “meh”, to the equal expression of literary genius, “it’s amazing” … and consequently compiled a (relatively) even-handed list below of more detailed …

Plastic Logic have announced a new electronic-reading device aimed at the business market.
The device mirros a 8.5 x 11-inch sheet of paper in size, is thinner than a pad of paper, has built-in wireless, and unlike the Kindle, will include native support for a number of common file types:
The Plastic Logic reader supports a full range of business document formats, such as Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint, and Adobe PDFs, as well as newspapers, periodicals and books.
Plastic Logic’s research indicates that professionals tend to read more business content than recreational content, …

I’ve had a (long) long-time interest in ebooks — back in 2000, I even devised a device called the Paper-Simulator 3000 (almost patent pending) — its main aim was to provide a method by which paper-book-addicts could migrate across to ebook reading. 
Complete with a strap on leather binder, dried-ink odour dispenser, and a motorised random paper-cut module it really was quite an ‘idea-of-the-day’.
But 8 years later, it seems it’s just not required… people are just (generally) happy to read ebooks — and are becoming more so. And not just on …

Adobe have announced plans to immediately discontinue the development of FlashPaper… Although some once touted FlashPaper as a PDF-killer, it never really fulfilled it’s promise in that regard. And, as you can imagine, any lingering PDF-killer thoughts, were quickly laid to rest when Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005.

Brad Feld raised a fair point in his The Kindle and DRM blog post today by posing the question — why isn’t it possible to share ebooks, which you’ve purchased through Amazon for your Kindle, with other people?
He’s not talking about creating multiple copies of the ebook and sharing it with people, he’s talking about actually transferring the ebook to another person, just like you would physically give a paper book to another person, so that they can read it. This happens every day with real books, between friends or …

Up until recently I had been thinking about buying a Kindle. From the reviews I’ve read, it sounds pretty good, and not having to carry around physical books is a real bonus.
So as preparation for buying a Kindle I thought I’d try reading a few e-books on my Eee PC, to see if I could stand reading books on an electronic device.
It turns out that a) I don’t mind reading books on an electronic device, if the device is right, and b) I don’t need a Kindle any more because …

Whilst we’re on the ebook theme, and PDF-based at that — if you already haven’t, it’s definitely worth taking the time to download a copy of Scott Adam’s God’s Debris as an eBook (PDF of course).
Published free for electronic download — it’s been so successful that it made its way over the electron-to-paper divide for sale at Amazon as a printed book (and other bookstores too), with new copies almost $11 including shipping.
But you’re free to shoot the PDF around to as many of your friends as you like, in …

As a follow on from my previous post, for those interested in PDF-based eBooks, I should draw your attention to the free books site Planet eBook — a site I co-founded with Planet PDF.
Whilst it’s now dedicated to to publishing a variety of classics — as unlocked free ebooks (and if requested, will hunt one down and perform the conversion for you) — at the time, it was dedicated to “hot off the press” news related to eBooks, which was front and center circa 2000.
One of the more interesting …

I’d presume that most of you will have heard of Project Gutenberg, it’s the non-profit organization started by Michael S. Hart, with a mission:
“To encourage the creation and distribution of ebooks in as many formats as possible for the entire world to read in as many languages as possible.”
Only public domain books are added, and there’s a few restrictions based on re-use of a Gutenberg title, with the brand intact, although if the Gutenberg reference is removed, a reader is free to do what they will with it — fancy …