I would like a 100$ e-book reader with an electronic paper display and pdf support, with no extra features, please.
Given that Amazon allowed their hit product to go out of stock over Christmas, methinks the supply of eInk isn't quite enough to meet the demand at $360, let alone $100.
Not the right price, but the PDF support is build right in. alt.binaries.e-book.technical will finally realise its promise.
Look at the video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdPLe8TU57U he puts it into landscape mode (the only semi-readable mode on small screened readers) and it doesn't fit to width or even centre.
Another idea worth considering is making Eink based reader yourself. However, a development kit from E-ink is "only" $3,000, at that price one might as well buy all the Eink based readers on the market and dissasemble them.
First you need a much larger screen. An A4 page at 5 inches is unreadable whereas a quarter size (landscape) is too little text between redraws.
Even if you get an iliad or some larger screened device PDFs are still a bad match. Thats because again the screen redraw. Reading a technical PDF isn't the same as reading a novel, you (or at least I) skip around at lot, skip code sections or want to go back.
Basically e-ink displays until they get the redraw below the perceptible level have only one acceptable use. Reading all the text sequentially where there's no formatting to get in the way of reflowing and resizing the text.
Native support for pdf displays the pdf as it requests same as it would appear on your computer. This is basically the point of postscript/pdf. All you can do is zoom in/out and pan you can't reflow it or break lines/pages differently.