Let me guess.. in case their military is incapacitated or gone and the country invaded by their neighbors, have their "Skynet" release their robots with Intel inside and a kamikaze wave of 200+ nukes into the outlying countries? Yep, sounds like Terminator's "Judgment Day" all the way ppl!

Bah! ive been using my PSP and some homebrew software to do most of what you are all complaining about (noone even mentioned it!):
colour - able to modify to any fore- and background,
back-lit - 4 brightness levels,
wide bright screen - quite good for reading,
small size - wouldn't like to drag an A5/A4 size machine when relaxing/traveling,
quite sturdy and dirt proof - i have dropped thing load & gotten v. dirty,
bookmark-able,
fast scroll-able,
zoom function (pdf only),
rotate,
font size (txt only),
supports .pdf & .txt,
not a bad price ~Euro 150 &
can play music, story pictures, browse internet (crappy), least of all play games
AND the homebrew community ensures frequent improvements and new features will be included in the near feature

Ok as for downsides:
low battery life - around 8 or so hours on lowest brightness level,
no highlighting or margin-writing function,
limited format supports,
still a bit slow loading on big colour images in pdf's,
doesn't like very big pdf's (+50mb) - very long loading times,
there might be a few more, cant think of em right now :)

Oh and i have saved a bom of money dl books/novels, i still buy loads but ive at least not turned my room in to library at the end of the year anymore - you'll find it on my psp :) So overall I think the PSP is quite a decent ebook reader and also beats a fair few of them. It simply suits my novel reading purposes and locations perfectly. The program i use for any interested is bookr v. 0.7.1, google it.

I have been waiting for a long time for a decent device like this, I find it surprising that this technological progress has taken so long to get to this stage considering that the hardware (and some of the software) has been around for awhile. So I realy hope this one pans out in the reviews. Wouldn't be cool if the above device had no wire and the earphones would be wirelessly connected?? Now THAT would take a real long time to come along, eh?