I feel like I should be writing about this whole eReader experience. Although I like technology, I'm very seldomly an early adopter of 1st-gen technology. But I'm making the plunge with this one, and I should really be sharing.

BTW, I cancelled my online order for the eReader, and ended up walking 6 blocks from work to the Sony Style store to get it there. I would say that's really annoying, but it turns out the reason they kept pushing back the ship date was something about California going up in flames. So they say, anyway. The device is really nice looking, and the text looks great on it.

The first issue I had was the fact that there's no software for the Mac. The Sony eReader comes with a software package kind of like iTunes (except written with a Swing interface, which makes me want to be a little sick), and there's only a Windows build (which is funny, since it's VERY clearly a Java app, so why not put in the extra couple of man-weeks to get it to work on Mac? But whatever). And Parallels wasn't recognizing anything plugged into my USB drive except my mouse. This isn't the fault of the eReader, clearly, but it was something I had to get dealt with before I got involved in the whole eReader thing.

Turns out, there's an extension which is loaded when you plug in the device that tells Parallels that OS X is currently using it, even when it's not. So Parallels won't use the device in use. I found a little hack here which taught me to use kextunload to uninstall the driver for com.apple.iokit.IOUSBMassStorageClass, and then Windows immediately recognized the Reader. Sweet. That is definitely news you can use. For
some definition of 'news', anyway.

Crap. During the authorization process for the eReader, the virtual Windows just bluescreened and crashed. This might take a while. I'll get back to you.