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

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

HTC Mogul phone (mine's from Sprint) completely meets your list. I imagine many others do as well, notably the iPhone.

Though in fact I hate the contact and calendar apps, and don't use them.

I avoid books in PDF format, though; the readers for other formats are far better. My preference is HTML or RTF.

[montoya.livejournal.com]

Acrobat is great as a reader on a TabletPC, if the content is sensibly sized. Full-screen mode, single button to flip pages back and forward, and clean attractive display.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

That's kind of the whole point -- for text-stream reading, I really REALLY don't want to be tied to a page size, especially not a large page size. Hence, PDF is a disaster for ebook reading for me. I want a device I can carry with me easily (with many books in it, to cover unexpected reading time). I want a device I can ready comfortably while reading. Both of these argue for smaller-than-paperback devices. I don't care about the small screen -- turning pages on everything I've used is much faster and easier than on paper, so it doesn't bother me at all.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

Bear in mind, I want something at least as large as a paperback, so I can read a page worth of text in the correct font size.

I alsowant Boom Tube capability, but I think that's a bit beyond the technology.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Okay, the HTC is smaller than a paperback.

Is this a theoretical requirement, or based on bad experience trying to read on real devices? For me, I find the smaller screen works fine, because "turning the page" is much easier and quicker; hence having to do it more often doesn't bother me (and I get a corresponding win from having a more convenient device size). (Font size is adjustable in the various software I've used; I end up picking smaller than paperback size, because the screen is self-lighting and much sharper than paperback printing.)