"I was particularly interested in a conversation I had with sceintific, technical and medical publisher WIley, where it hinted that it and other specialists may get involved in driving the adoption of eBooks.
Could we see the eBook reader adopt a similar model to the mobile phone where users sign up to a subscription service, content of a particular kind in this case, and in return they get a sleek and sexy device? It's certainly worked for the mobile industry, which now resembles the car world with its emphasis on styling and marketing." (from
http://www.thebookseller.com/blogs/4...to-arrive.html )
This comment brings O'Reilly to my mind with their Safari service.
http://safari.oreilly.com/ It's a library service for technical books. I would love to have something like this combined with a good reader device. Well, that is as long as it had a good search function which sadly is missing from most current offerings. I have a backbreaking number of O'Reilly books that I cart back and forth between job and home depending on what projects either my husband or I are working on. They take up a lot of real estate & paper. The information becomes outdated quickly. I'm constantly needing new ones. I often want them immediately. This is a niche that is prime for ebooks and a good reading device. You can get electronic copies of a lot of technical books but often people end up printing out chapters to avoid eye strain when they'd prefer to leave them electronic and searchable. It feels so silly having the text on the screen to search and then flipping to the dead tree page in your hand. It shouldn't have to be that way. At home we probably have an entire bookcase or two full of books like this (most from O'Reilly) that I would love to have on a sleek, portable reader rather than taking up precious square footage in my house.