Recently several new dedicated book readers have been released. The Kindle, Illiad, Cybook, and Sony's Reader are some of the better know devices. These new products all share the new E Ink display. In many ways these devices do a great job as book readers. They all have high contrast, long battery life, and can each hold many books at once.

These devices also share several problems.

• Price -- They are too expensive for their intended function.
• Display Speed -- The E Ink display takes to long to refresh.
• Limited Content -- Each has different content restrictions, while the Cybook is the most open it is not able to view commercial books with DRM.
• Proprietary Formats -- Each company with the exception of Cybook wants to lock the user into a single format.
• Screen Size -- This is debatable but with a one size fits all approach they are either too big for casual readers or too small for technical users.
• Limited or no Web Surfing
  
• No color

None of the issues above by itself would be a killer, but together they are going to make it quite hard to sell these devices to the general public. With a price tag of at least $250 up to $600 these devices are too limited for the average user. At a price of around $100 the average person would be more willing to buy and use one of these devices. At $300 a user can instead just buy a cheap laptop that will do all of the same functions with none of the limitations. The advantages of a high contrast, long battery life, book reader just aren't enough to get the average person to buy one of these. The technical people that I know have all found solutions that are less expensive for reading electronic books from the net.

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