Video of Cybook Gen3 shows Vizplex in action

[Gameboy70]

Originally Posted by mike b

... if you're doing research or office work. Most of the academic papers out there are in pdf, latex, or Word. More and more business documents are in pdf. If there were an ereader that could read tex or Word documents then no worries (is there one?). But until there is, I can't see much usefulness for a reader without pdf.

It seems to me that to get the ebook/ereader market really going, you _need_ to cater to the needs of the average business/lab/office worker in their day-to-day job. Either that or drop the ereader prices to a par with other toys like Nintendo DS', etc.

The main problem right now, at least with the Sony Reader, is that it lacks native A4/Letter Size PDF support. When these documents are rescaled, the font rendering doesn't preserve the document's native weight, and the results are generally too pale to be usable. Unofficial tools like Alex's wonderful RasterFarian correct this, but the translation should happen natively.

By the way, does the same problem occur with the Iliad? At 1024 x 768, I would think that rescaling would cease to be an issue.

Anyway, I was impressed by the Cybook in the video, especially by the fast refresh. I haven't been bothered by the page turning on the Sony, but now I see how much room for improvement there is.

I'll probably get one of these. My hope for the Sony was to be able to read online content offline more than to read books. I have some HTML support solutions in place, but they're all more trouble than they're worth compared to native rendering. And, like everyone else has noted, Mobipocket seems to have more of a future than BBeB.

[JSWolf]

The iLiad has a better PDF display program avalable for it, plus the higher resolution makes it better then the Sony for PDF display overall. The Cybook won't have PDF support when it is released. if you want e-ink and PDF, the iLiad is your best bet right now. I was look at ebooks earlier today and noticed that MobiPocket books are more expensive for the EXACT SAME CONTENT!

[delphidb96]

JSWolf,

Exactly *where* did you hear that the Cybook won't have PDF support? Because that's not what we've been hearing.

Yes, the Gen3, which has the 6" screen, won't do an adequate job of displaying the larger-page PDF files, but then the Sony has the same problem when displaying PDFs formatted to a larger page.

But any PDF file which is formatted to fit a 6" 'page' will display just fine. Of course, most PDF formatted ebooks *aren't* formatted to that page size, but it's easy enough to strip out the text and graphics and re-format to Mobi or LRF for the time being.

No, I wouldn't recommend attempting to use a Sony PRS500 or Cybook Gen3 for reading A4 (or larger) pages. But then, just try reading a PDF page formatted to 13" x 19" on an Iliad... Trust me, you won't like it.

Derek

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The iLiad has a better PDF display program avalable for it, plus the higher resolution makes it better then the Sony for PDF display overall. The Cybook won't have PDF support when it is released. if you want e-ink and PDF, the iLiad is your best bet right now. I was look at ebooks earlier today and noticed that MobiPocket books are more expensive for the EXACT SAME CONTENT!