iRex iLiad is the reader of this age. Ever after the first time I laid my eyes on it, I have been dying to get my hand on one.
The spec sheet shines! 
an 8.1-inch e ink 768x1024 pixels display with 16 levels of grayscale can guarantee this machine showing any A5 PDF document as clear as crystal (most books are around A5 size).
I would like to buy an iLiad. $699 seems expensive, someone might suggest you to buy a cheap laptop just to read books. Don't listen to them, LCD monitor harms your eyes with the backlight. iLiad don't. Instead of a LCD, E Ink Corporation provides a electrophoretic display (EPD) for iLiad. EPDs does not emit light, it simply rearrange pigments and reflects light, so it does no more harm to the eyes than a piece of paper. In fact, a white paper might be more harmful than the EPD for iLiad because white paper usually reflect more light.
iLiad runs on Linux, it won't be long until a lot of cool applications will run on it. Currently, iLiad have MP3 support with 3rd party applications.
Some pictures of iLiad, click to see the full image. There are more images in this comment about how it works with math showing math formulas. A post in mobileread have really high resolution pictures.

iLiad under sunlight

iLiad render Count down to Spanish

iLiad compare with normal document

iLiad render Simplified Chinese

iLiad render Traditional Chinese
Sorry, after reading the comment, I did some research, and found the ones down here are the M218A from a Chinese company, and it's 2380 RMB.

M218A in white background

M218A with a image of some Asian girl

M218A showing all languages

M218A showing newspaper
I'm so poor right now else I can get my hand on it
Usually applicants of student loans are more likely to abide by the rules of mortgage rates and less likely to use their payday loans or eventually give in to debt help either.
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The last 4 pictures are not
The last 4 pictures are not of the iLiad.
Formulas on iliad
Hi, and first of all thanks for the post and pictures, they are really helpful.
I noticed a scientific article print out next to the iliad on one of the pictures, which raised a speculation that you might have tried to load one into the iliad. If it is so, maybe you could answer to the question that is crucial for me (and lots of other mathematicians I know):
how well can you read mathematical text on iliad? For example a standard 11 or 12 pt (maybe latex produced) pdf with formulas. I read that sony reader is awful for pdf-s.
It would be a great help if you could share your experience on the topic, this tool can be a great help for the academic community...
Best regards,
Norayr Matevosyan
I don't have a iLiad, those
I don't have a iLiad, those pictures are I collected from a Chinese iLiad forum. I will ask over there for you.

Even I don't have a iLiad, I can tell you what to expect.
If you want to use iLiad to show a full page (that's why people buy a reader anyway..), the math equations might not look neat. Because iLiad is meant to read A5 size books while most math publications uses A4 or Letter size paper(I guess it depends on the publication country), and by simply resize to a A5 size, it's going to look not as nice as on paper. There is no official iLiad emulator, but it's possible to produce the iLiad effect by doing some simple DIY work.
Change your screen resolution to 1024*768. Then rotate you desktop 90 degrees. Different graphic adapter have different ways to do it, google search might help. If you are using a laptop, get a mouse before you do that, some poorly designed computer have touchpad that act strange after the rotation(like Dell Inspiron 1200 I'm using). After that, open the file you want to test in full screen mode.
Because the computer monitor is larger than the iLiad, some trigonometry have to be used. In this senerio, 2 similar tetrahedrons have to be constructed. I believe you know what I'm talking about. But just in case someone else stumble upon this comment, I will describe how to exactly do it.
Point A locates on the eye.
First, find out how far do you usually read, by measuring eye sight to the corner of the book you are reading, AE. iLiad will exist as the plane EDBC. The computer monitor should be located at where FGHI is. Divide your screen's diagonal by 8.1 inches, that would be the ratio between AE and AI, find AI, then you know how to locate the computer monitor. Read from that distance and that is a good emulation of iLiad. Eyes does not function exactly as I'm illustrated here, if you are near sighted, use your glasses.
From what I read, letter size pages might pose some difficulty, because have to zoom in each time. But people have created latex scripts that split one page into two for this reason, it might be helpful.
BTW the diagram is created by the asymptote code below:
pair A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I; A=(0,0); C=(4,-3); B=(3,-4); D=(4,3); E=(3,4); F=(6,-8); G=(8,-6); H=(8,6); I=(6,8); label("Eye",A,S);dot(A); label("B",B,S);dot(B); label("C",C,S);dot(C); label("D",D,N);dot(D); label("E",E,N);dot(E); label("F",F,S);dot(F); label("G",G,S);dot(G); label("H",H,N);dot(H); label("I",I,N);dot(I); draw(A--G); draw(A--F); draw(A--I); draw(A--H); draw(E--D); draw(B--E); draw(B--C); draw(C--D); draw(F--G); draw(H--G); draw(H--I); draw(I--F);But please, judge yourself, here are some pictures. Thx to lufee from iPOP, the company selling iLiad in China. The original post is in Chinese, here is the English version with my comment in [].
I asked for images of showing page two of a nice inequality paper as a standard math paper anyone would read, page six of Harmonic division for rendering complex geometric shapes, page 1 of Lifting the Exponent for it's superscripts.
Here they are in order, click to see the enlarged image:
Nice Inequality:




Initial view: [looks a bit small, considering the camera are really close to the paper]
Zoom in view: [This looks really good, most math papers have a huge margin around the page, cutting them off produces a lot better result]
Zoom in view, Landscape:[It can be inferred that landscape view without zoom should be the best for math publications]
Zoom in view, Landscape:
Harmonic Division:





Initial view:[I can't believe I can actually see the difference between those very close circles in the initial view]
Zoom in view:
Zoom in view, bottom page:
Zoom in view, Landscape, Top:
Zoom in view, Landscape, Bottom:
Lifting the Exponent





Initial view:[The picture is a bit blurry...]
Zoom in view:
Partial Zoom in:
Partial Zoom in, Landscape:
Partial Zoom in, Landscape, same as above, camera position changes:
If iLiad have programs remove margins or some program auto zoom, then the images show iLiad is possible for math publications. Even if there isn't any, landscape view should be good enough for most works.
Thank you very much!
Thank you very much for all the time and energy you put in this answer! The pictures are very useful and do create a good idea about how it will look.
Basically I would have to use ACROBAT's crop tool for the articles that I do not have the source latex for, but then the articles would be quite readable.
You are correct about the size of iliad, but still, it is the biggest e-ink reader I know exists on market. An a4/letter size reader with responsive touch screen and integrated text recognition would be the ideal tool (maybe even the asymptote and latex integrated - should be not too complicated since iliad runs linux as I understand).
Thanks for the illustration and the calculations, i did something similar only trying to resize and print the article on A5 paper. But still, the pictures were needed to confirm the looks of the formulas.
So once again, thank you very much for all the efforts. This makes things quite clear: at the moment the best options seems to be to get the iliad and crop the articles in acrobat, or reformat the ones with the latex source.
All the best,
Norayr Matevosyan
Welcome, I'm glad I can
Welcome, I'm glad I can help.
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