You would think that designing an electronic device for books would be straightforward.

After all, decades of computer innovation have shown us how responsive the industry can be to new concepts. What you need is a way to complement printed books with features only digital devices can supply.

So where are the e-book readers?

Sony's new entry initially captures the eye because it's slim, rather elegant, and boasts a fine six-inch screen based on a readable technology from E Ink, a Cambridge, Mass.-based company that has figured out how to make text on a screen look much like text on paper. The Sony Reader is thin and light, and its battery life is superb because it uses no power until you change the display by turning a page.

But where this $350 device falls down is in its core features. Looking back at e-book devices over the past few years, I get the sense that the people designing them are people who don't read books in the first place. Because what you want out of an e-book is not to mimic a printed book but to extend it. And those extensions should be child's play in today's digital world.

Why would you want an electronic book without search capability? The benefit I find in reading Project Gutenberg texts on a hand-held iPaq is that I can quickly search backward in the text to refresh my memory about key events and characters.

But the Sony Reader has no search function. Nor does it allow you to link to an onboard dictionary, something I do all the time with my PDA -- tap on a word and up pops the full definition, courtesy of Merriam-Webster.

The list goes on. I don't like to mark up good hardcover texts, but an e-book should let you annotate freely. Where is this function in the Sony Reader, and why does it not allow me to simply highlight a text, as I can do in any paperback with a yellow marker? Sure, I can store bunches of books on the Sony device, but that's about it when it comes to real advantages over printed books.

E-books have been failing expectations for years now, but look what's happening around the periphery. Solid software such as Mobipocket (www.mobipocket.com) and the soon-to-be-released DotReader (www.dotreader.com) offer all the above functions and more for hand-helds.

Somebody is going to use this inspiration to get things right in a mass-produced dedicated device that will serve as a useful adjunct to printed books. My hunch is it won't be Sony.

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Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child project is an extraordinarily ambitious plan to get cheap laptop computers into the hands of schoolchildren all over the world.

By cheap, I mean $100, the cost of which would be absorbed by government agencies in the countries to which the laptops are sent. Already, Nigeria, Brazil, Argentina and Thailand have committed to buying a million machines each.

It's a grand notion, and the problems associated with such low-end production are being solved. The biggest has been to create a display that is inexpensive, low-power and readable in varying light conditions. But the organization has come up with a new high-resolution display (1,200 x 900 pixels, better than 95 percent of laptops on the market) that runs at a fraction of traditional power consumption and is but a third of the price of conventional displays.

Running on Linux, the laptops will bring into the developing world the kind of resources students there can only dream of now. The machines will be wireless-enabled and rugged, using a flash drive instead of a hard disk. They'll also be capable of using alternative energy sources such as the sun -- they can even be charged with a wind-up crank.

See laptop.org for more about an audacious project with powerful backing by names like Google, eBay and Advanced Micro Devices. It could be a life-changer for millions.

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We'll have much to discuss about Windows Vista as we approach its January release, but Symantec and McAfee are having their say now.

Remember how Microsoft swallowed the browser by incorporating Internet Explorer into its operating system? The two security companies believe it's doing the same thing with security software. They'd like users to be able to turn off the centralized security center Vista provides and run third-party security centers instead.

Discussions continue, but it looks like a January release of Vista won't be derailed, and a robust market niche may default to Microsoft.

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In my recent column about YouTube, I inadvertently left out the online-video company's third co-founder, Jawed Karim.