Quote:
Originally Posted by rhadin
One other thing that I have noted is that when I show them that to use my Sony all they have to do is turn it on, pick a book, a read, they are delighted. They tend to lose their fear because it is an easy experience.
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However, too simple can sometimes be a bad thing. In talking about ebook readers to various people I've been asked why I picked the Kindle over the Sony quite a few times. The first thing I mention is lack of dictionary support. Every single person I've mentioned that to was aghast it didn't have such a simple thing. How could you have a little computer that displays books that doesn't have such basic features like a dictionary or the ability to search your books for a word? Sometimes people assume that a feature they think should reasonably be there must be there.
As for talking about formats with newbies, we had somebody in here a few weeks after the Kindle came out who had bought a Sony Reader and was shocked to find out he couldn't buy books from Amazon. Same sort of idea. He thought of course he could just buy an ebook and read it on an ebook reader. Seems simple and straight forward, no? Except that's not the way it works and folks who are new the ebook world won't necessarily get that. I've found that it's not too hard to explain to folks the proprietary format thing even if they're not technical and sadly they do need to at least know that they can't read all books on all devices.