A personal jet-pack for the 21st century

[james_davis_nicoll]

Shorter John Siracusa: e-books' coming domination of publishing is inevitable, do you hear me? Inevitable!

Nicked from Charles Stross, who pretty much would have to be more positive about e-books than I am.

Comments

[schizmatic.livejournal.com]

Agreed. If I could read and annotate my PDF's on a Kindle (or similar product), I'd buy one tomorrow.

Heck, if they can make computer screens of e-paper (or whatever they're calling it) that would also be wonderful. Seriously, I hate that reading PDF's or my own drafts is still staring at a light bulb.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

As a half-assed sort of "creative class" knowledge professional, I have over 10 gigs of PDFs. I'd love for there to be a way to read them at the gym or on the train, like an MP3 player. I read maybe low five figures of pages of text a month on a computer, and it sucks. But I'm not going to waste my time and money and living space printing out the damn things.

There are tens of millions of people in the U.S. who regularly use page display software of some sort for personal use. Why lock them out? I could see it for technical reasons, if eInk didn't scale up or something. (Which seems to be the problem for color display.) But it's a failure of ergonomic design to assume people only want to read something the size of a paperback.

[goingferal.livejournal.com]

I've heard the Iliad reader is excellent for PDFs--might be worth checking into for you.

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

You can read PDFs on the existing readers -- I read them on my Sony Reader all the time. I don't know how it stacks up compared to the Iliad, which another person suggested, but it does work. (The one obvious advantage of the Iliad with reference to your complaints is that it's larger.)

I don't think it's a failure of ergonomic design so much as trying to make an initial device that appeals to the largest number of people possible. A smaller-than-letter size device is MUCH more appealing for the majority of people for whom eReaders are useful. Eventually, one presumed that the market will open up to the point where more specialized devices for people whose needs aren't covered by the mass-market devices will happen. eInk can be scaled to larger sizes -- it's just a matter of needing to do what's best to grow the market first. I think the astoundly weird feature set of the Kindle 2 is good proof that we're still in the "figuring out what consumers want," phase of things.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

The Sony's closer to the ergonomic style I like, but the screen is still too small. I'm a block text at a glance reader, which admittedly is a tiny market, but I also read a lot of journal articles -- graphs, illustrations, formulas, tables -- which is a rather larger one.

I don't know what market research says about e-reader appeal, but people do read quite a bit of material in magazine sized format. I have a fair number of mass market paperbacks, but I don't actually like that size. The Vintage trade paperback size is pretty close to ideal for me. If I were a hardware guy, and eInk came in screen sizes greater than 10 inches diagonal, I'd homebrew something with a notebook sized screen and Adobe Reader style buttons.