These are "thoughts."
"ereader" (or something with that name) has been around a long time. I have been using it on my Palm PDA for years. When the IPhone and ITouch came out, they developed a version for that device. A fair number of current books that can be read by the ereader have been available at a site called Fictionwise, but the selection was not the greatest and prices worse. Tons of books whose copyright had expired have been available for free from a number of sites including ManyBooks.
A couple of months ago, Barnes and Noble (obviously wanting to get into the electronic books and fast) bought out Fictionwise and the ereader. After about a month, prices at Fictionwise came down to something more comparable with what a Kindle book would cost (and the selection of current books seems to be increasing).
I haven't downloaded the ereader from Barnes and Noble and don't know if this is a revamped version. I have seen where it will read the files that one could read with previous versions of the ereader, but I don't know if the reverse is true. Oddly, if you compare prices for ebooks at Barnes and Noble's own site with those at Fictionwise, they are often different with the advantage sometimes going to one and sometimes to the other.
As far as the ereader itself, it has some advantages over the Kindle. I like that a clock is always showing, page numbers are more sensible, you can tap a button and see how many pages are in the chapter that you are reading, and a few other features. (The Palm and the ITouch have touch screens, so I don't know how some of this will translate to the Mac.)
I personally would not read off a computer screen in that the glare is fatiguing to the eyes and the length of lines can be overly long. One thing that could help with the glare (and this is what I do with the Palm) is the ereader (at least the earlier version) allows you to choose colors and to invert the screen (instead of looking at dark letters against a glaring white background, you can look at lightly shaded letter colors against a dark background). I use brighter colored letters for day and softer colors for evening. (Reading in bed with a Palm is great in that you don't need a nightlight. However, reading outside in bright daylight is poor. Advantage on the latter to the Kindle.)
Finally, rumor has it that Barnes and Noble will soon come out with a Kindle type device that will read the ereader files. In addition, rumor is that they will eventually have something in their stores so that if you see a book that interests you, they will be able to scan the barcode and then produce an ereader file that you buy instead of the book.
