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Originally Posted by MR. Pockets
Well, I have tried several ereader "apps" and have found them all to be quite inferior to dedicated ereaders as far as the interface goes. If later ereaders lose the focus of being primarily for reading on (or at least reading on them being a large part of their job), I'm afraid they will become harder to use for reading. Yes, multi-purpose devices are nice, but they generally do lots of things in an inferior manner to dedicated devices. Some people are fine with that, but I don't really need the other stuff (yes, it is really cool to have a "do-everything" device).
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Which ones?
I have an assortment here, including Mobipocket for the PC and for Palm OS, eReader for the PC and Palm OS, Plucker for Palm OS, The Kindle and nook apps for the PC, the eBook Viewer app for eBookwise IMP files, FBReader (a cross platform app for Windows, Linux, and other platforms supporting a variety of ebook formats, several different PDF viewers for Windows and Linux, and an assortment of miscellaneous other things.
There are some basics I demand of any such app. The first is that it properly display the ebook formats it's designed to read. The second is that it gives me some control over the precise display of the content, allowing me to adjust what fonts are used, the font display size, the line spacing and margins, and the amount of margin used. The third is that it provides some means of classifying and categorizing the books, so I don't necessarily see one huge list of all 4,000+ plus volumes in my electronic library, and can sort books by user defined criteria, and display only specified subsets of my library according to selection criteria I specify.
Of course, I want acceptable performance when I am reading a book, with commands to let me navigate through the book, find specific sections of text, and set bookmarks. And I want the ability to follow hyperlinks and display images in the text, scaled to fit the screen.
Most of what I use can do those things, though there are differences in precisely how the app does it, and I am sometimes constrained by the underlying platform.
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Apart from a few folks on here, I have yet to meet anyone who doesn't have a problem reading (for long periods) on a backlit screen. That's why I said "most".
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It's still anecdotal evidence. You may well be right that the majority of the market will like a non-backlit screen better, but at the moment there's no real evidence either way.
I do wonder, however, if the type of content being read has an effect on this. Almost everyone reading ebooks on whatever device also has a computer, either desktop or laptop, that they use for web surfing, email, videos and the like. They are also likely to have and use a computer at the office as part of their job. So they'll wind up spending quite a few hours in any particular day looking at a backlit screen and reading what's displayed on it.
People reading ebooks are reading large masses of continuous text, whether it is fiction or non-fiction, and the text is all related and part of the same content stream, unlike the more scattered text viewed in standard PC usage, where the presentation and topics vary widely, and you aren't reading a lot of text about any particular thing.
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I'm not saying that they should be limited to only displaying text. The Kindle can do several things (music player, web browsing), but, it makes sure that it is a good ereader before it considers the other things
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That's a matter of software. It's also in part constrained by the deice it's implemented on. For instance, I can read Mobipocket format ebooks on my PDA and on my desktop and laptop, but the Mobi software on the PCs can do things the version on the PDA cannot, because the PDA platform does not support the operations.
Platform, format, and software are all moving targets.
But I don't see what a dedicated reader that acquires other capabilities should become worse for reading. If it still does what it did before the same way it did it then, and you found the existing behavior acceptable, how would the ability to do other things as well damage that?
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Dennis