See these everywhere in China. I know of serious players who have spent up to $3,000 (US) on magnetic devices that can be secretly placed under the table as it shuffles to influence how the tiles are stacked... Hi-tech Mah jong cheating!

In southern China - Mah Jong addiction is a fairly common cause of family break up, child-neglect, heavy indebtedness and suicide. i know a lot of people who will play this game around the clock and for days on end.

E-books ARE THE BEST!

My (dead tree) book library weighs well over 1,000 kg - more than 1 metric tonne – and that is since I thinned it down with a lot of trips to donate at thrift stores. I have paid to transport it across and between 3 continents for 30 years - and yet I still rarely have it where I want it when I want it - and it's always damaged a little more when I do get it.

This has frustrated me for years because I travel a lot and I read a lot.

I would like an ebook reader.

Now, I have a compromise - an old IBM ThinkPad that does the job almost perfectly. It's a dedicated portable library. I have installed MS reader plus ABC lit converter, + Adobe Professional and OpenOffice. With this setup, I can make almost any e-book/text file comfortable to read in about 5-10 minutes editing time. If you convert any doc to c5 size pdf - you have a reasonable paperback experience. MS Reader has brilliant type and a real book-sized viewing area with adjustable font size. Arial and Times New Roman are your editing friends

Althouh reading on a CRT is useless, a decent LCD is no problem. My ThinkPad is about the size and weight of a many hefty hardbacks. Type size, and back lighting are adjustable, and it rests on a small pillow for reading in bed, on the sofa or in a hammock. It currently holds around 20,000 books plus a decent reference library of several hundred volumes. I back it all up to a few DVD's. A Pentium 2 is plenty power for this setup so an obsolete small notebook is ideal.

At first, i thought it would be difficult. I almost dreaded trying to read anything substantial with it. But now - I have read on this device daily for several years and I actually prefer it to the experience of reading many of the older original volumes in my collection, especially those with brittle yellow pages and small type sizes. Forget about the negativity of those who will tell you its not the same unless you can hold it and smell it and feel the texture of the cover. If you are a REAL reader and interested in books for their actual content - ebooks are fine.

I promise you, those who take the plunge will never look back. The ebook is without doubt the future. Having said that however, there is still absolutely no way I would buy a dedicated reader locked into any particular format. Also, I will not have a DRM'd book on my hard drive and I NEVER register my copies of MS reader - if it doesn't work, or comes up with a copyright 'please jump through these hoops' request - it's recycle bin time....