I've been reading ebooks on a Palm Pilot for several years and now also on my Blackberry. They don't have the best reading interfaces but they work fine and they are much more portable than larger ebook readers. I've read "War and Peace" on a Palm Pilot and "Notre-Dame de Paris" on my Blackberry so it is possible to read large and challenging books on these devices. You can find free ebooks for Palm Pilot (and several other formats) at http://memoware.com/ and for both platforms at http://gutenberg.net/ .

Why not ask for some volunteers to write your application for BOINC, a popular, open-source distributed computing platform? This would give you the added benefit of global, free computing resources for your project(s). Several people are knowledgeable about writing applications for the BOINC platform, and several others have experience writing code for other BOINC-based scientific applications and might be interested in contributing to yours.

actually you hear "Here comes the sun."