The device is small, thin and easy to use. Downloading took about a minute for the book. When I turned it on this morning both The Chronicle and The Huffington Post loaded immediately. When I finished reading Murikami last night - a very good sign in and of itself - I went online and splurged on a leather cover, another sign something is happening in the relationship. It's not like buying the lady a ring, but more like buying her a mink coat (in the making of which no small animals were harmed or annoyed).

The only comment I'll make until I've used it for a while is that reading the book was easy in this format, not a lot different in practice from holding and reading the real thing. The newspaper is less similar in the way you're able (or not able) to get an overview of the stories by spreading it out on a table, although reading the stories themselves was comfortable and easy. It is, however, a “different” experience, particularly for the newspaper, magazine and blog and, I suspect, that's the crux of it: when I've used it for a while and become accustomed to the somewhat “claustrophobic” quality of being limited by the small (but easy to read) screen versus the larger overview provided by spreading out a newspaper or a magazine on a table, I don't know, maybe I'll prefer it in some circumstances. Time will tell.

It's different, but again, perhaps just through novelty, I read an entire albeit not overly long book last night and I'll try another today.

Oh, and the primary hard drive on my main desktop computer failed yesterday, so I'm doing the journal on the laptop. Pain in the butt. I didn't lose any photographs or the like, but I may have lost my email contact list. Pain in the butt.