My daughter goes to a school that has this. I had mixed feelings about it until they came after me because I screwed up the lobby check in process and was walking out with my daughter. How did they know who was taking her? I'd rather they protect her than not. I also don't worry so much about kids bringing weapons to school, rape in the parking lot, and so on. All of these things happen in a nearby school system that doesn't have it's own police force.

This is all true, if you're using the wrong technology. If you use something like the Sony PRS-600 or 700, then you get all of this and there is no "video screen" to annoy you. It looks like text on paper, and feels like a lightweight portable electronic device. It's very addictive.

Of course you will, because a lot of text is not formatted for an eReader screen size, and the tools to transfer random documents to an eReader are not readily available - with the exception of Calibre, which hopefully soon will include the ability to spider sites and convert that to an ePub or other ebook format.

The current generation of readers are mostly 6" and mostly grayscale. The high-end of the next generation (or maybe two generations away) will be color, larger and have a touch screen for highlighting, annotation, etc. This is moot, however, many textbook publishers just give away their own reader software for notebooks, and sell deeply discounted electronic versions.

Sony is doing the library thing. It's a bit new, and currently is mostly audio, but they do support text books checked out to a Sony Reader. Library Search

As far as I can tell, the Sony PRS readers meet most of your specifications:

You could easily use a solar USB charger on it, the amount of energy it uses is negligible.

It's fairly durable, but you wouldn't want to get a book or any electronic device wet. I've dropped it a couple of times, and it's generally a bad idea - like any other electronic device.

The editing isn't available, and wouldn't work - the display is too slow, as is the processor. There's probably no reason an eInk device in the future couldn't handle this, however.

I had a brand new TRS-80 Model I with 8K ram... and 4K rom Level-I BASIC ... did a 'modification' to it from a magazine article and piggybacked a character generator chip that supported both upper *and* lowercase characters! Woo-Hoo!

It didn't have a serial port... I had a little program I'd load into RAM from cassette tape that would modulate the cassette port and, through an adapter cable, it plugged into my 300 baud modem... it could only go 110 baud... but, hey, I got on-line! I downloaded and uploaded binary code by converting it to ascii/hex and converted them back to binary with hex2bin.com and really got into Compuserves 'CB' channel. Even had a on-line romance thing going on .

Later bought the 'expansion interface'... with 48K ram and dual floppy disk drives. TRSDOS, NewDOS80, DosPLUS... even got a 7.5 MB (not Gig ..., Meg) hard drive... worked great... Wrote C, Z-80 Assembly Language, Forth, Pascal as well as BASIC. Them were the days!

Finally traded the old workhorse to a door to door salesman for a Kirby vacuum cleaner. Well, the vacuum cleaner still works... as does my old TRS-80 Model-4P that I bought after that. It still runs all my old Model I programs... but then, they still run on my Slackware Linux box with the Xtrs emulator.

Cheers -

Chuck Bell
'Cyborg' on the CB channel in those days