I also think the biggest part of the announcement was pdf support. I think pdf now becomes a required feature for any competitive reader product. Yes. this is a VERY important development. On one hand it is nice because there are many free PDF converters around nowadays. But nice

don kretz wrote: though it is, PDF plus proprietary formats are not all one might ask. For instance, I am wondering whether Kindles and similar devices and interfaces will be deliberately obstructive by refusing to read any but their own approved versions of the notation. Though I am tempted (thanks Jim et Al et al. for the pricing info) I also am strongly inclined to vote with my patience and my wallet for waiting till some rival device appears that will read several of the most important data formats, including common word processors AND ABOVE ALL, vanilla TXT. I am not as wedded to TXT as Michael Hart, but I still regard it as the most basic requirement for many purposes. Cheaper also would be nice, but not as important as the other considerations. I may of course have missed something, I commonly do, as I demonstrated with my ignorance about the Kindle price, and if so I should be grateful for enlightenment on the point, but I noticed no such features mentioned in the snippets that I did see. In any case I think it is an important theme and I invite thoughts on the subject. For instance, using a reader for reading is all very well, but I read a LOT of stuff besides ebooks, including HTM, TXT, DOC and a job lot besides. PDF is increasingly important certainly, but I want something that can connect to a flash drive or the like and read most of the stuff I might put on it. That would make the device indispensible to the office user as well as the newspaper reader and the readers of ... (what were those things agian? Poogs? Anyway, fluttery things with scribbly stuff.). Trying to make the device depend on particular formats would be (should be) commercially suicidal and I would contribute my mite to assistance at the suicide of the perpetrators. After all, if they think that no one will ever discover how to make such a device outside the US, I reckon they will discover some painful truths about wishful thinking. Personally I am strongly repelled by a format that I cannot easily read in its internal notation. Many years ago I used to work in the computer industry and I made it my business to be able to read most of the extant file formats. Nowadays I am a user and I neither am interested in investing that sort of time, nor able to cover all the hundreds (thousands?) of formats that are pullulating out there. Any comments (about the Kindle rather than my ignorance, for preference!) Cheers, Jon