I am an avid fan of eBooks on portable devices. I do not like reading eBooks on a standard computer monitor or LCD. I started with the original Rocket eBook from Nuvomedia. And have never looked back. I upgraded to the REB 1100 when my Rocket eBook died. With the available librarian software you could download your books to your computer and then load them to the eBook reader. There is an encryption capability tied to an id and the reader so you could purchase secure eBooks from reasonable well known authors. The downside of this is that the book is explicitly tied to the reader. As long as the reader keeps working and/or the vendor stays in business there's no problems. Well as it happened Gemstar decided to get out of the business and I along with many others are now stuck with eBooks that only work on a single reader. Luckily only a small number of my eBooks are encrypted but it is annoying. So now Fictionwise has introduced the eBookwise 1150 which is the successor to the REB 1100. Since this once again allows purchase of encrytped books it widens the available choice of books. I bought one (I'm obviously a gluten for punishment) and am very pleased with it. All these devices have exactly the same form factor. They are about the size of a paperback book. The readers are a little heavier then I would like but they can be held with one hand which is great for reading on subway which is where I mainly use the readers. As far as buying encrypted books, I avoid them if possible but will buy them if I am really interested. Since I seldom read book more then once its not too much of problem if the I lose the access to the book somewhere down the road. I have also started reading ebooks on my Palm LifeDrive. The screen is a little smaller then I'd like but still very readable. The reason I use this is that there are (encrypted) eBooks available for the Palm that are not available for the previous reading devices. So this gives me a wider availability of books.