More Words, Deeper Hole

I think there's two different niches here.

PDF + A4/Letter (or possibly trade paperback if you're willing to shrink it a bit) sized device is what you need for the Textbook, Coffee-Table Book, Newspaper, Magazine, Scientific Paper (with diagrams), and Comic/Graphic Novel/RPG Handook markets. Ideally you want full colour for some of these. There's not really a great *technological* solution for this niche yet unless you're willing to go netbook.

However, for the novel, short story, just give me the million words your infeasibly long fanfic ma'am, and let me reflow your big wodge of continuous text to size of my screen markets, that would be an amazingly inconvenient device to have to lug around. And PDF sucks for this because things in PDF expect to have a fixed layout and be presented on fixed size page. For this market you really actually only need black and white. This is *technologically* solved, today now. Hell, Palm pretty much solved it back in the day. Today that's your iPhone or phone from another manufacturer of a similar form factor, and they'll throw in colour for free.

Probably due to me just not getting the book as fetish object hing, I don't really think 'black and white paperback novel OF THE FUTURE!' technologies such as e-ink are actually a real niche. Not really. You either want just the text because the text is really all there is to what your reading and you want it right now on the device you already have your pocket anywhere you happen to be, or you actually need the layout and graphics because the text *isn't* all there is to it and then you need something hefty enough to render the graphics and the layout real well.

However since the big problem is all publishing/pricing/marketing end of things, not the technologies, that's what the Kindle is trying to solve, unfortunately it tries to do it with a 'black and white paperback sized novel OF THE FUTURE'. Which I find intensely annoying, as it doesn't conform to my prejudices :)