Some Youtube videoclips, and new readers galore

I ran across an interesting videoclip of a Kindle DX demo and looked at a few others; few are done well; there is usually so much noise from people around, you can't hear what's being said or the video is very discolored or so jerky you can get a headache from trying to watch them.  If you have any to recommend, let me know.

One that's clear is by Consumer Reports and is short.

A mother video'd by her son shopping for books at Costco using her Kindle DX to look up the titles and the cost of the Kindle editions is pretty funny in that you wouldn't expect to see this.

There's also a video of of someone's DX showing PDFs that he scanned himself. They look fine but the pages are so crowded that they'd be hard to read unless you rotated them, which would then enlarge the letters, but he didn't do that!
  It does show the speed of page turns for a PDF scanned by him, so I left it in as people have asked on forums what page turns are like on PDFs.

  Bear in mind that if a PDF is heavy with large images, it'll be slow, but this was a normal one with text mixed with the usual diagrams.

  Just a light, weekend entry here with no controversy.

I have some announcements of even more competing readers being released, and since there's little info yet, they're at my Twitter area which will carry unusual items I read about but don't want to do entries on yet.  These are of course items limited to 140 characters in length, and some have already praised God for that, but 140 characters are enough to link to interesting news articles.

  While checking out all these new e-readers, one thing that strikes me is how difficult or expensive it must be (in software programming time) to offer e-readers with annotation tools like the Kindles all have and the higher-priced Sony one has (Sony is also releasing 2 new readers, their lower cost one with no annotation tools at all and very little storage).

  Except for the Sony PRS-600, the new readers have no highlighting or notes capability, no searches of book and the device, and no in-line dictionary.  And of course they've no active, free wireless access to the Net, not to mention no web browser.  Even if the Kindle's is slow, it's useable.  Some new devices will have wireless capability but almost surely not included for free as the Kindle has; yet in many cases the unit will cost almost the same as the Kindle.

Neither Cellular nor WiFi wireless is needed for reading, but cellular (anywhere) wireless has been a huge factor in the success of the Kindle.  While books can be read on the smaller smart phones, it's not very comfortable for sustained reading.  Being able to grab a book out of the air is a real attraction.

 The only non-expensive one that interests me right now is the Astak, and then only as a secondary reader or if you don't need study tools or wireless access.   It has excellent flexibility in file formats though, but on a screen even smaller than the Kindle 2's.  More on that later, but details are linked to at the Twitter page.