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Originally Posted by DMcCunney
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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Kindle for PC, Nook for PC, Kobo for PC, and eReader Pro for Windows. I found Kobo to be ok, and Ereader Pro to be the best (I do like the customization it offers) but they don't match my ereader for usability (Ereader Pro might. I haven't used it much).
Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
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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Interesting. And probably true for lots of people. I just know that for me at least, trying to read on my computer for long at all messes my eyes up for the rest of the day and can give me a headache. (Yes, I do wear glasses and no, I'm not over 50.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
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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As long as it still did reading great, it wouldn't. But generally, I've found devices that try to do lots of things, fail at at least one of those things.
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Originally Posted by cmdahler
As nearly as I can determine, then, the only thing that truly defines a product as an "ereader" is, um, well, whether it has the word "ereader" stamped somewhere on the box. That is, without doubt, an interesting methodology you have there for determining a product's market potential. I would assume, then, that if Apple had printed the word "ereader" on the box, you would happily extol its virtues to the ereader community?
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Not at all. I would claim that the iPad is not an ereader for two reasons (#1 being the main one);
1. It is not a dedicated (no, I don't mean "does only does one thing".) device. (Remember those definitions?)
2. It's screen is backlit. (This is not necessarily a reason, but added to 1, it does generally push it farther out of the "ereader" realm.)
I would say that the iPad (and other devices) can be
used as an ereader (and for some people they will work just fine), but it is not inherently an ereader as many articles that I have seen seem to think it is.
Quote:
Originally Posted by cmdahler
Now, considering (a) first, it would seem that in all reality, the quality of the reading app is actually of very little importance for the device to be termed an ereader. For example, take the Sony 505. This is, you may or may not realize, a tablet PC running Linux as its OS. I'm sure by this point you are thoroughly horrified. But to press on: if you peruse MR on this particular ereader (although I'm not exactly clear on whether we can still call it that, but its box does have that word printed on it somewhere, so I believe we're still on safe ground here), you will find that a goodly number of folks consider the ePub rendering capabilities of the 505 to be fairly sub-par. Not really the highest quality out there. If you then compare that to the iPad's native ePub and PDF app, iBooks, you are left with the distinct impression that there are good things and bad things about both. The two apps, the 505's unnamed app and iBooks, are both fairly simple ePub renderers with limitations that may or may not be important to the particular end user. Consequently, since we can roughly conclude that the iBooks app is generally on par with the quality of the 505's reading app, but the 505 is an "ereader" whereas the iPad is not, we seem to have determined that the actual quality of the reading app is not what defines a device as an ereader.
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I have actually never seen/used either device. However, you have made me think quite a bit about the ereader/tablet differences and I would like to try reading on an iPad when I get the chance.