Observe the Specifications page, where the same footnote appears at the bottom, but not in the body text where the Format list appears (“BBeB Book / Adobe® PDF / JPEG / MP3″ – notice the shorter format list that shown in the OP). Based on my experience with the Librie, I read the footnote as referring to RSS feeds and Word docs, not PDFs or JPEGs (which Sony claims elsewhere that the Reader supports natively). RSS on the Librie requires the Newspaper for Librie conversion utility, which was virtually useless for me since the interface was in Japanese.

The Sony Reader is just beyond your price threshold, but at least it’s possible to mount a Memory Stick in Linux and get content onto the device, which is what some people have done with the Librie.

According to this page: http://products.sel.sony.com/pa/prs/reader_features.html

At the bottom you will see:
Books are just the beginning for the Sony® Reader. It also displays Adobe® PDFs, personal documents, blogs, newsfeeds, and JPEGs with the same amazing readability, so you can take your favorite blogs and online newspapers with you.7

7 These formats require file conversion to BBeB using supplied software.

I personally use linux on my home computer. I doubt that their supplied software runs on linux.

I am looking forward to the public release of the Iliad, however I will never pay over $300 for an ebook reader. If they could get the hardware down to a reasonable price I would by one for myself and probably one for my father. He has trouble reading fine print in most paper back books and the ability to zoom in and make the print larger would give him the opportunity to read more, something he truly enjoys.

So it looks like I need to wait a few years for someone to release a truly useful reader that doesn’t tie you to some propriatary DRM or software. Until then I will make due with using my old reliable Zaurus for reading ebooks.

Sony has manually edited the specs on their SonyStyle site for the Reader several times, with the format list expanding and contracting, without even maintaining consistency from page to page. At one point the only listed formats were BBeB, PDF, JPEG and MP3. The full scope of what files are and aren’t supported has been a moving target for months. Journalists at CES were told that HTML was supported as well, which has never been corroborated on SonyStyle. Sony could simply maintain two spec lists: one for native formats, and another for formats supported through conversion. At times, Sony has stated that the Reader supports “other” text formats that may require conversion, but now they’re only specifying DOC as the only one.

Despite costing 2.5x as much as the Reader, I’m inclined to purchase the Iliad instead becase (a) in unequivocally supports XHTML (more important for me that MS Word), and (b) because its 1024 x 768 @ 158 dpi resolution seems more appropriate for reading A4-sized PDFs than the Sony Reader’s 800 X 600 resolution @ 170 dpi.

Thanks, David.