Automation. Time.
I want to spend as little time each morning loading new content on to my reader. I want to be able to plug it in, and have new content downloaded for me. Blogs and news websites are easy enough to handle -- I can use RSS feeds. For the short stories I like to read, many are brought down either from archives of one sort or another (usually either NNTP/news archives or collections web sites.) By being able to rate the stories on my reader, my sync software can make descisions for me without having to prompt me on my computer -- which means I can "plug it in, and go about getting ready for work" and not have to sit there answering questions.
This kind of automation could also be used for things other simply "rating a book" -- it could be used for automating research. For example, you could examine book marked pages, drop all "common usage" words, and isolate words to automatically go out and retrieve wikipedia articles for. It could be used to mark that your "done reading" a book, so that it can automatically be removed and replaced with the next book in a series. Or if your presented with a product catalog, where there is one product per page, you could use this to autmatically place orders for products (based on which ones you book marked) -- or at least, all book marked items could automatically be placed in a shopping cart that you review.
In the product catalog scenario, you could even have an automated program that scans your reader's book, determines the authors of books, finds other books by the same author, appends extra pages to the end of your books with little one page overviews of the authors other works. Then if you book mark those books, your sync software will know to retireve/purchase those and download them.
It's all about being able to do quick input, into the reader, when/where you happen to be thinking about something that needs to be noted. Then having another piece of automated software take that input and do something with it.
I don't know about you, but there are so many things that go on in my average day, that I almost always forget about little things here and there. That's the whole reason why the reader gives you the ability to bookmark in the first place. If we could always remember the details (what page we saw things) then we wouldn't need that feature. I just want to take it a step farther, and use that bookmark feature to note other things for me that I may either forget about later, or for which I have time to deal with *now* and I happen to conveniantly have my reader with me.
Bah... that got much longer then I intended...
