Quote:
Originally Posted by Valloric
And I can't believe I'm saying this, but folder support is the killer feature to get for the Reader. What on God's green Earth were they thinking when they thought "meh... who needs that?". From what I gathered from the firmware update thread, one of the things they're working on is supporting epub, which is a format no one is using, and there is no mention what so ever about the most basic file browsing support.
|
It is almost without doubt the case that Sony have not implemented folder support because this is a device aimed at non computer-experts and many less-knowledgeable computer users get very confused by folders. Look at the typical home computer and you'll find that people tend (on a Windows machine) to put everything in the "My Documents" folder. Implementing folder support would probably have resulted in large numbers of support calls from people complaining that their books have "disappeared".
Companies like Sony spend lots of money doing market research; the way the Reader is the way it is (reading but not displaying folders) is very likely because that's what they found that people wanted.
The Reader is not alone in this; the CyBook Gen3, Kindle, Pocket PC devices - they all work in this way, showing the contents of folders in a "flat list". There has to be a good reason for that, given the massive amounts of money these companies spend on product testing and market research.
We (on MR) don't represent the typical user of these devices; they are aimed at the NON-expert.