However, science fiction is still a fine genre for reviewing in this venue. Let's face it, a lot of us who are cool enough to like Palm devices of various sorts and carry them around with us are also the sort of people who like speculative fiction - and want to carry it around with us to read at our convenience. The combination is a natural, like peanut butter and chocolate.

Palm devices aren't just handy for writing down those pearls of wisdom that Harlan Ellison spews like buckshot. They enable you to have, on hand, the database of "Books I Want To Buy" BEFORE you go into the dealers' rooms and spend several months' allowance of pocket money on tasty-looking paperbacks.

When it comes to packing your Palm unit with SF reading material, you're probably going to want to explore options aside from the traditional "it's a million years old and out of print" route. Yes, you can find all kinds of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne at MemoWare, and that, as the poet said, ain't hay. But if you limit yourself to this approach you're missing some creative new avenues for getting good stuff to read.

Buying bits from Peanut Press
Peanut Press (at http://www.peanutpress.com) is a new publisher that publishes electronic versions of classic science fiction and fantasy works, as well as original, contemporary works and popular media tie-in novels. I thought I'd spend a little cash to report to you on the experience of buying an (electronic) book strictly for Palm device consumption.

If you're going to buy books from Peanut Press, you might be interested to know that I have only positive things to say about the whole experience. The online store worked just as it should (I have met e-stores that didn't). And there's immediate gratification: after your credit card is authorized, you download your books right then. Every download includes the Peanut Reader software, which I think is excessive. Once I have it, I won't need it next time. If I were downloading over a modem I wouldn't relish wasting the time to download that extra few hundred kilobytes.