I have spent tens of thousands of dollars over the years for books. The price of printed books goes up each year, to where a 35 cent novel of my high school days is now a $5 investment. I can remember the first time I spent a whole dollar on a really thick novel, and thought I was being extravagant. Today that same book would be at least $6.95.

And what of serious works of non-fiction? Have you priced Gibbon's The History of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire? I seldom get out of a bookstore without spending at least $35.

A possibly even greater problem is the storage space required by a really good collection of books. When we move, well over half the weight of our household goods is in the form of books, outweighing such "light" items as washers, dryers, refrigerators, couches and chairs. The physical space required is prohibitive within the normal sized household for a good library.

But now there is the electronic solution to this dilemma:

Here are just a few of it's cool features:

• Large screen size for easy reading
  
  
• Relative small size for storing a huge library of books
  
  
• 1000's of FREE books for the downloading on the Internet
  
  
• Large numbers of current titles that can be purchased
  
  

The reader comes with a leather case, and can be read in any lighting situation. You can read with the lights out, or with them on, and the text is clear and easy to see. The battery lasts for 5 hours, but you can read with it plugged into the AC adapter if you like.

Turning the page is done with the click of a button, and you can bookmark your place. When you turn on your Cybook, it starts up where you left off, even without setting a bookmark.

You can sync up to your computer for easy book transfers. It comes with a 129 megabyte memory card, but I purchased a 1 Gigabyte memory card for mine at Costco, so I can put on more books at one time than I would probably read in a lifetime. (At 600 KB per book, that would be over 1700 books.)

This is really cool, and I highly recommend it to anyone who likes to read while holding a book in your hands. (A laptop, or worse, a desktop computer just isn't the same for reading books.)

Enjoy!