Quote:
Originally Posted by Dajala
I owned an eBookwise that had this feature and I used it twice in three years...
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I haven't owned an ebook reader device before, but while reading a "real" book I used dead-tree dictionary lookup constantly (including translation, usually French-to-English). Most recently I've used my iPaq for this, though I never read books on it. I can be a very "picky" reader with a book that I feel strongly enough about that certainty on the meaning of a word is a must. For example, Primo Levi's 'If This Is A Man' and 'The Truce' took me a long time to read, looking up words, including the occasional French, as sometimes words don't
precisely mean what I might think they mean or may have deduced via context, or can mean more than I expect (that, and these books are worth slow contemplation, as distressing as they may be). Also, I think it was HarryT who mentioned requiring a specialist dictionary while reading some older literature he is fond of, as the older dictionary contained definitions of words that had fallen into disuse and didn't appear in current dictionaries.
Thus, dictionary lookup was an absolute requirement for me. Text search would have been next, but that feature seems to be lacking in eInk readers in all but the Kindle (which was not an option).
For that reason, the Sony was really dead-in-the-water for me. Only price kept it there for a time as an option.
Cheers,
Marc