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Buying A eBook Reader For Yourself
By Busy Door Guest Blogger | February 25, 2009
For almost twenty years, the perfect portable ebook reading hardware has been 5 years away. We are now at the stage where we wait for a cheap enough, lower power enough paper-quality display with long battery life.
Once we have cheap and affordable ebooks, the medium by which we read will also be the medium by which can write and respond. Reading will cease being a solitary act and will become a social one eventually. You can see this already with blogs and the online likes.
So, I have been assuming that the ebook reader will mimic the form factor of books: display a page, and maybe make a rustling sound as the page is turned slowly. But it takes the ebook so long to arrive for the market that they may skip book emulation entirely and become general purpose browsers/composers. In which case, they will work better for blogs than for books.
In my opinion, format matters a whole bunch more than medium. In this world, format (e.g. hardcover, small-print soft-cover, magazine, etc.) gives a whole bunch of cues about the type and depth of the content. Photos placed at the right spots will certainly attract attention. The formats also tell us a lot about age appropriateness. I do not ebooks catching on until they really have a format to them. So perhaps that makes a bunch of different ebook reader niches rather than an e-book monolith.Who knows in the first place.
eBook can become ubiquitous only of the prices of the book content is at an acceptable level. RCA ebook readers have been around for years, but I still do not see people using them on the trains, buses and airplanes. On the other hand, almost everyone of my friend has one of those. Why? And that is because we all read Russian. And Russian ebooks are dirt cheap in the first place (if not free).
So, yes, in that sense I do hope ebooks jump directly to supporting blog-like content, otherwise we might wait another twenty years before the perfect ebook hardware emerges and gain mass adoption.
Topics: Product Reviews |
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