So, following a bit of um-ing and er-ing about it, yesterday I bought myself one of those electronic reader devices – specifically, the Sony PRS600 Touch which you can see in the picture.

I have a sneaking suspicion that I’ve probably railed against electronic readers before on the blog, which is just typical of my hypocrisy and inability to maintain an opinion – well, either that, or maybe I’m the apotheosis of my suspicion that time, experience and emotion conspire to make fools and liars of us all.

That aside, the rather mundane truth is that I’ve recently been given some very lengthy PDFs which I need to read and review, and given my tendency to migraine headaches, I don’t want to spend any more time in front of a screen than I absolutely have to, and the non-backlit nature of the reader, plus its portability, seems a pretty good solution.

So far, I’m find it’s very much fit for purpose. I’m not looking to buy loads of eBooks (if any – I already have enough actual paper books waiting to be read), but I’ve loaded the PDfs successfully and they seem to work fine. Oh, and Sony give me 100 classic (yes, that does mean out-of-copyright) books with it, so it’s fairly well stocked pretty much from the start.

The main reason for my posting, though, is to share something I thought was quite amusing, though perhaps only if you have a bit of familiarity with the book in question; there are various sample chapters on the Reader when you buy it (in a variety of languages: Le Rouge Et Le Noir and Les Trois Mousquetaires, to name but deux), and one of those is the opening couple of chapters of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. I think Douglas Adams would be amused by this.

But no, the Reader doesn’t have the words ‘DON’T PANIC’ inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover. Although a customisation plan does spring to mind…

And before you ask why I didn’t just get the Stanza app for the iPhone, my simple answer would be ‘because I don’t have an iPhone’.