Gizmo or functional tool?

As we were walking through the mall just before Christmas, I was telling Rebecca that I thought the various e-readers on the market would be hot gift ideas this year. Just after saying that I think my suspicions were confirmed when, as we walked past the Sony store, we saw a small crowd of shoppers huddled around Sony’s Reader display. I haven’t done a ton of research on the subject, as at the present time I still prefer having a paper and ink book in my hands, but I think there are 3 real “players” in the e-reader market: Amazon’s Kindle, Sony’s Reader and Barnes & Noble’s Nook. Next year there will no doubt be a bunch of other entries into the market. For cruisers looking to save the space and weight of a big library of books, these might just be the ticket. I’m pretty sure the specialty cruising books that make up most of our library are not (yet) available for them though, making them much less attractive for us. And as I already mentioned, I prefer paper. Hopefully that will change with time because it sure would be really nice to not have to carry around hundreds of pounds of books!