eBooks, Sony eReader and Calibre

I'm rather enjoying ebooks at the moment. I've got a Sony E-Reader (a PRS-350 in blue) and although it's only a 5" screen it has adequate display real-estate to read the vast majority of books in comfort, especially with the slightly reduced weight and the smaller form factor able to fit into my suit pocket. It's not great for diagrams and tables but works ok. The downside especially compared to the Amazon Kindle is most definitely library management. Sony do not, and in my opinion never will, have a clue how to produce quality easy to use desktop software. If I called it horrendous it would be too kind and generous. It's unusable. I've switched to Calibre, which is a good in many ways. It supports a vast array of readers, it can copy the books back from the reader into the library which lets me use Calibre on several computers to put books on, and it allows me to edit the metadata too. I've got a selection of books from various sources. Unlike the Kindle it's a bit trickier to find books sometimes, but I quite like:

• Peachpit
• Kobo
• Manning
• A Book Apart

It's also possible to get books from the Gutenberg project and from Google Books. There's also Waterstones, WH Smiths, and so on but I've yet to try them. Other places work trying are Penguin for fiction, and even Tesco has an ebook store now. Calibre also has a pretty good list of ebook stores built in via the 'get books' menu, but I always forget it's there. The news download fetch thingy is a bit overrated because I don't plug the reader into the computer on a daily basis but if I did it would be a nice way of having current affairs reading material in my pocket for train journeys. There's lots of plugins too, but no way of having Instapaper or ReadItLater on the reader, either of which would be great. All-in-all I like Calibre, it's a bit ugly but it works well and when I ditch OSX it'll still be useful on Linux or Windows (depending on which way the cookie crumbles) simply by copying the library and downloading the right version for the new OS. Also when I eventually break this reader (it will happen) I can get a new one with some confidence that it'll just work. It's great not being tied into one manufacturer, and if it doesn't work, hey it's just PDFs and EPUB files.