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

[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.