I friend of mine sent me this link to an AP article about more e-book readers. Conceptually, I like the idea that we can read books on a screen. While I sometimes like to have "paper in hand", there are many times when electronic books are the right answer for me.

But, from what I read, it is sounding like the VHS vs. Beta debate expanded 10 times. We have an assortment of formats, players with an assortment of formats and generally an assortment of generally incompatible answers for a single (for the consumer) problem.

Long ago, in my early Linux days, I remember harassing Adobe dweebs at trade show about the idea of them offering a PDF reader for Linux. Many times they assured me it would never happen. I guess someone (possibly me) explained that the P in PDF means portable. I have used PDFs for years for reference information and other things I want to have around to access when needed. In my electronics hobby alone, it allowed me to get rid of a few hundred pounds of data books.

The one issue I had with PDFs was that you couldn't exactly mend the corner of a page or scribble a note (or correction) in the margin. Today I use Okular, a popular PDF reader that allows you to bookmark, highlight and add notes. Yesterday, I was using it to think about what I wanted to order from a seed catalog.

To me, an e-book reader should be something that is light-weight, runs for a long time on a battery and allows me to run something like Okular to read PDFs. The idea of high-end units that allow downloads over a WiFi or 3G link is fine but that is not an excuse to come up with a new data format.

For me, the consumer, a PDF is fine and it also means that I can choose to read the book on my computer rather than having to have a special reader. It should be my choice.