I had the pleasure of attending the International Digital Publishing Forum's Digital Book 2007 gathering yesterday. As always, an interesting event. It's an eclectic mix of soft/hardware houses ranging from SONY to Adobe to publishers, tech geeks, and press slobs like me (needs more librarians).

There's lots of cool stuff on hand but the coolest of the cool was also the smallest. Mark Carey, CEO of OSoft, demoed a thingie called the dotReader, which essentially is an open source customizable reading platform stored on a flash drive. Plug it into a PC, and as we say in Noo Yawk, badabing, you're good to go. You have your own stuff (ebooks, multimedia, or whatever is your pleasure) and via the PC's Net connection, you can jump onto the web or pull stuff in.

This gizmo the size of your pinky gives you access to everything from Dickens to YouTube. Now that's cool!