The Kobo Touch

I've bought a black Kobo Touch via the US. I quite like it, in some ways more than the Kindle. I like the soft rubbery covering for example. And the screen is actually a little bit lighter than the Kindle's. (By the way, I recently learned that there can be pretty big variations in how light or dark Kindle screens are, I had no idea.)  It is compact and light, only 184 grams (Kindle 3 is about 250, the K4 is 160 grams).

Another thing it does well is that unlike the Kindle, it has several different typefaces to choose from, and an almost step-less setting of the text size, that's excellent. You can also set the margins, which is only possible on the Kindle with special software. This is how it should be, I am not sure why the Kindle is so weak on these points, it's not like they don't have the resources to change it!

And oddity though is that the Kobo ebook store, while being praiseworthy for being one of the few to sell outside the US, demands all your data, address etc, every time you buy a book. This is just crazy. I understand that Amazon has a ownership of the one-click concept somehow, but to demand that one fills in *all* the data every time, that's just nuts.

I should also say that it was not exactly cheap to import it. The device was about $150. The shipping was about $70. And the import tax to UK was $120 (£76)! Gulp.
Import taxes are evil and are holding back the global economy, no matter how comfy they seem to the individual country in the short run.