But yes, I have been waiting for a device like this for ages. I tried a smaller e-ink device, but trying to view PDFs on that was painful at best. I'm even wondering if 1200x1600 resolution is good enough for scientific papers.
Why letter size? Isn't that a little bit obscure?
Unless you're in the USA, where it's the standard paper size.
Nearly everyone else standardised on ISO 216 paper sizes decades ago, but the USA insists on doing its own thing as usual.
I own a few Sony products, but I tend to flinch a little with any Sony product that: (A) Probably has a DRM scheme associated with it (as most e-readers do, I assume this one does as well). or (B) Requires me to plug it into my PC and install Sony produced software.
It may have been a long time ago, but I tend to be one of those guys where trust is easy to establish, easy to break and serious loss of trust is nearly impossible to recover from. The Rootkit Incident was a serious loss of trust to me, so I'll steer clear for now. It's too bad, even at $1100, it'd be worth it to handle my collection of printed-to-pdf notes, documents and books.
That there, is a big turn-off for me. What business would Sony making a device like that which requires their own specialised software to interface it with a normal computer. There are standards for these things. The USB mass storage device standard is well-established already.
It was also nine years ago. We have to move on eventually.
Also, they killed Lik-Sang just for selling across region boundaries.