Quote:
Originally Posted by paolamanzini
On this, though - what are the advantages of a touch screen on a "standard one"? too silly a question?
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Well, with electronic devices you don't *have* to write on the margins only, y'know.
Sometimes we take the paper metaphor too far; there really is no need to clutter the screen with always-visible notes with electronic media. On PocketPCs and Tablet PCs, for example, annotation and note-taking can be done via pop-ups that stay unobtrusively out of the way, leaving just a highlight or small icon that expands into a full note with a click/tap as well as the faux paper-n-ink approach.
Until we see some demo videos we won't know what approach Pocketbook is taking but hopefully they'll take full advantage of the virtual nature of electronic documents to give us newer/better ways to work with than just imitation paper. PDF is bad enough that way all by itself.
As for the advantages of touch-based input versus a cursor based virtual keyboard; well, speed. The standard Pockebook virtual keyboard is reasonably fast but still falls short of the speed you can hunt-and-peck a virtual keyboard on a touch screen. For pure ebook reading this isn't particularly relevant but for electronic document work it might be worth it if you intend to do a *lot* of document annotation.
The other thing you need to consider when it comes to electronic paper annotation is how you're you're going to get the annotations out. What format? What can you do with it? Some document formats, like docx, OneNote, ppt, etc, are *designed* to carry annotations (in text or ink) within the standard document format. Pdf as a rule doesn't. So you may find yourself with anotations that must be exported separately from the annotated document.
Just a word of caution.