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The ability to read all of them isn't the point -- the desire to be able to select what to read next from a large library is one of the very appealing aspects of ebooks, which I agree with Sealbeater about.
When I go into a bookstore, I don't expect to be confronted with only 300 titles. I expect to be able select from thousands. And I don't expect to be told, "Wait, we'll get something you want from the warehouse. Just wait and we'll empty these 300 titles and give you 300 more to select from!"
Yet that is what the current generation of ebook readers forces on readers. The potential is to be able to carry thousands of books with us -- why else would they include the memory cards? Yet they don't build the ability to utilize the capacity of memory cards easily into the operating systems of the readers. What's up with that? The comparison to having a 160GB mp3 player which can actually only conveniently index 80GB of mp3 files is a good one -- the public simply wouldn't stand for it.
However, the mp3 player field has much more competition, so that each mp3 player manufacturer has to build things to get the most out of all the potential. Unfortunately, the ebook reader marketplace is so limited that the manufacturers feel there is no need to fully implement the potential.
When I am reading, sometimes I want to read a mystery, and sometimes I want to read a history and sometimes I want to read a biography and sometimes a music theory and sometimes a music history and sometimes a computer how-to and sometimes a humor book. And I quite often keep 4 or 5 books current at the same time. And I definitely like to go to my reference shelf (which isn't just a dictionary and thesaurus and atlas) and look things up.
I want my ebook reader to give me the same capacity -- it can hold well over 4000 books with a high-capacity memory card, so it should have the ability to handle them as easily as it does ebooks stored in the internal memory.
I am definitely with Sealbeater on this one -- it's like the built-in mp3 player capability. Why include the stupid thing if it doesn't work well? We have all complained about that and very few use the mp3 capability at all because it sucks to high heaven.
And I am tired of the arguments "you can only read one book at a time, why do you need 4000?" or "Reading at 1 book a day, it would take you over 11 years to get through your 4000."
Do people who make such arguments really only keep a few books in their house at a time? Throwing out or giving away already-read books instead of leaving them on their bookshelves to re-read some day?
PG gives us over 20,000 books (yes, many are old magazines, and many are in foreign languages I don't want to read) and wouldn't it be cool to have a library like that in our pocket? so the next time somebody says "So-and-so says something like 'blah-blah-blah' in his book 'Things I Have Written'" you can pull that up easily on your screen and either verify that or shoot it down?
How many times have people misquoted the Bible when I've been around, usually to support some view they have and want to force on others? I've always wished I had a Bible to put in their hands and say "show me where it says that!"
ebook readers hold this promise -- I am hopeful that someday they can actually live up to their promise!
It will be very interesting to see if the new OS in the 700 makes having extended libraries easy to work with!
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