wish list

Megan McArdle digs her Kindle. People in the business of making books, unsurprisingly, not so much.

I'm pretty sure I haven't a use for it just now, but I am a confirmed late adopter. There won't be a flat-screen TV in my house until the CRT explodes, and I am desperately clinging to my current cell phone for its most endearing feature of being a phone and nothing else. Hell, my car doesn't even have (meaningful) air conditioning, and the most temperate place I've ever lived with it is North Carolina.

Where was I?

Right, I don't think I need a Kindle for my relatively modest 1-2 books/month habit.

WHAT I WANT NEED...is essentially the same thing (a stripped-down, compact device with a highly readable screen) onto which I can load .pdf files of journal articles, that is hooked into Pubmed the way Kindle is hooked into Wikipedia, and also includes a tablet-type functionality enabling me to highlight and scribble snarky notes about the authors onto the documents the way I do with the printouts I currently lug around a dozen or so at a time in my briefcase, until they come to rest in one of several piles on my desk to be forgotten and printed out again six months hence when I realize that I can actually locate them faster on the internet than I can on my desk.

Also, if they could be fully searchable that would be swell. Category tags, naturally, are a must. And if it could spit out a nice Endnote or Reference Manager-type bibliography to merge into a Word document, that would be pretty cool, too.

Yeah, I realize I could do all of this with some effort and a decent laptop, but the thing I'm looking for is something that might also force me to plow through the journal articles without easily transitioning to looking at something (i.e., anything) more entertaining on the internet.

I love our house full of books, and may it ever be thus. But the sooner I get the paper out of my office, the better...