A comment - turned into a post

I was writing a response to the comments left on my previous post and it seemed to turn into yet another post, so here I am.

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As long as whatever company steps up to the plate and makes a good e-book reader that's open to standards and, this is something I don't think will happen for a while, nice programming tools, I'll buy it. Wouldn't it be neat if you could (easily) program the multitude of consumer devices coming on the market? Imagine adding meat to the skeletal structure of the iPod, like the ability to play WMA's and OGG's or run games, without flashing the whole thing to the penguin OS.

The fact that Sony is being an arrogant asshole when it comes to standards is a flaw in the Reader, but I'd still buy the damn thing, if only there was a wide array of sci-fi available to purchase. As soon as I can buy Larry Niven's novels (only short stories are available so far) and Steven Gould's "Jumper", still my favorite after all these years, I'm walking into the closest Borders and slapping down 350$ and my dignity for the chance to hold that beautiful device in my hands.

[About there being many ebooks online, like at Project Gutenberg] Yeah... See, I'm not all into Dickens and Faulkner. At the moment I'm plowing through yet another strange novel by Vonnegut, but normally it's Heinlein and Niven (though I think I've read all of Niven). Next on my list is picking up the first of a trilogy by Robert Sawyer. Which, of course, isn't available in ebook form. Seems that either I change my reading habits and get the oh-so-cool Reader or continue to lug semi-weighty paperbacks around.

This is somewhat off-topic, but it's yet another reason I am avoiding ebooks: it's not standardized. I was just on Fictionwise, a place that actually has a fair amount of sci-fi, even if they are mostly short stories. But there's no set standard! Some books are in Palm format, others are in Microsoft's own format, and there are quite a few that are audio books, sold as 14-hour MP3 files. Blech! No thanks. This is coming back to that programmability thing I mentioned: once you can easily modify the software on one of these readers, someone will come up with an elegant (and illegal) program that allows you to read every single format without bothering to figure out what it is and how you're supposed to convert it to Sony's own format.