I have been tracking eReaders for several years now, and have been delighted by all of the eInk readers that are now available.  The problem for me is that I do not want to spend $300 dollars for a reader, I would be willing to pay $100 but nothing for that price exists.  Instead, I have been reading books on my computer screen. 

Recently, Amazon released the Kindle reader.  As a result it has received mixed reviews, but did get quite a bit of publicity as it was on the cover of Newsweek.  The product looks like it could be useful, but from the negative reviews it is hard to convince myself to spend $400 on something that really won't help me much.  Instead, a better use of $400 is would be to by a One Laptop Per Child laptop.  It has a long battery life when in the reader view, and also has a very sharp screen.  This is actually probably just as energy efficient for reading books and works with PDF and wifi.

Even though I think that the OLPC is a better deal for a eReader, it is not good enough for me.  My reluctance to purchase a OLPC laptop is largely due to my dislike of the person who is running OLPC. 

Instead, I have found a reader that fits my budget (free) and works on my existing portable device.  I am talking about MobiPocket, which works on my HTC Wizard cell phone.  Once loaded, I turned the background to grey, and voila it looks like a Kindle screen.  An advantage that MobiPocket has over the Kindle is that it has software to run on your desktop that you can use to read and annotate books and then sync the book and annotations with the one on your portable device.  So now I have a nice management tool for my books and a convenient way to carry them with me.  More importantly, my portable device is much more powerful than a Kindle.

There are 2 bugs that I have noticed with this software, but they are not super important.  On my phone the toolbar for the reader does not display, but these are just quick link buttons anyway, and I can still do all of the tasks I want to.  The second bug is on the desktop, it doesn't import a folder of files, instead you have to import each book one at a time.

One last point I will make about MobiPocket is that the file size is smaller than a PDF and looks great on my phone.  I can easily change the orientation and read books on a wider screen.  It also has a nice autoscroll feature, which I doubt the kindle has. 

So if you are like me and want to read books on a portable device, try MobiPocket and tell me what you think.  Bear in mind that it is not 100% amazing, but it is better than shelling out $400 for something that you can't fit in your pocket.