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Hungry Gerbil posted:I have the Bookeen Cybook (e-ink) and I'm pretty satisfied with it. It's lightweight, has a good interface and supports quite a few formats. I bought a Cybook Opus a year ago and I'm still satisfied with it too. Its 5" screen makes it smaller and thinner than a lot of the paperbacks I used to carry around in my jacket pocket. I like that the page turn buttons are placed perfectly for using the device with one hand and that when I push the power button, it instantly boots up to the last screen I was on. While I don't have any intention of replacing it, I don't think I'd buy another one if it stopped working. The Kindle and Nook are a much better value.
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Nov 22, 2010 19:50
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Yeah, that's the most surprising thing to come out of the rise in popularity of ebooks. I never would have guessed that the equivalent digital copy of a book could somehow be worth more than a new printed copy. That's completely unintuitive from the consumer's point of view. If it makes sense at all, it must make sense only from the publisher's perspective. Even if publishers do have a calculated business reason for making ebooks more expensive, their decisions look arbitrary and their practices seem like price gouging to the general public.
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Nov 22, 2010 20:40
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On a different note, it's great to see e-ink devices finally begin to approach the $100 mark and attract much larger audiences. It was about this time three years ago when the first kindles rolled out for about $400 each. Before that, most people had never even heard of e-ink. The market for this technology has really grown over four years, yet it's easy to imagine that it might not ever have taken off if it launched a bit later when cell phones and tablets began to turn into multimedia platforms. At this point, it seems like most people expect that color will be the next big step for eReaders. That probably will happen, but I think that flexibility and disposability will likely be the selling points for e-ink in the future. Today, all commercial ereader models are a variation on a single design: there's a 5-10" screen surrounded by a bezel and mounted on a rigid board of plastic. Earlier models were just the same only more fragile because the e-ink film had to be backed on a sheet of glass instead of plastic. In the near future, I hope we'll see some vastly different designs that make use of rollable/foldable e-ink displays. It would be great to see a flexible device with the dimensions of a mailing envelope that unfolded three times to give you a display the size of an 8.5 x 11" document. Some 5" eReader manufacturers (Sony, Bookeen) exaggerate to call their devices pocket-sized. A truly pocket-sized device would have to fold or spool a flexible screen into a compact roll. The Readius prototype gives some idea of what might be possible, but unfortunately it looks like rear end. Hopefully we'll see improvements on that concept. In time, maybe the screens could be flexible enough to allow scroll-like displays that are no larger than a marker when rolled up. Until then, it is promising to see the prices of inflexible e-ink displays fall rapidly. A durable, low cost, low power reading device could have an enormous positive impact on a number of people around the world who lack access to educational resources. Where an internet connection is unavailable, unreliable, or unaffordable, these devices have the greatest potential to inform and educate.
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Nov 23, 2010 00:54
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A recent article in the Wall Street Journal announces the imminent launch of a Google E-Book store called Google Editions: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704369304575632602305759466.html?mod=djemalertTECH#articleTabs%3Darticle highlights posted:... I hope that there will be a way to download files of the books purchased from Google Editions to a device that can't connect to the internet. But even if the ebooks are confined to the cloud I think I would still use this service on my laptop over the Nook and Kindle software. This sounds very lucrative for Google and very convenient for readers who want access to hard-to-find books. Mathlete fucked around with this message at 04:21 on Dec 3, 2010 |
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Dec 3, 2010 04:18
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