[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by mdmorrissey

My prediction is based quite simply on the failure of e-readers to do what any lap/net/book/tablet can do, which is make everything on the net readable.

This may be because not everyone agrees with you that an ebook reader's purpose is to "make everything on the net readable"; some of us just want to read books, and find our readers to be excellent for that.

They should have limited themselves to producing simple, cheap devices that would allow you to transfer a few gigs of text from the computer screen and take it to bed (and elsewhere) with you. They do NOT do that now...

Excuse me? That's exactly what my ebook reader does: I fill it up with ebooks and take it to bed (and elsewhere) with me. They most certainly DO do that now. I'm not joking when I say I bought my PRS-505 to read Project Gutenberg in bed. I was doing that this evening (well, sprawled across the bed rather than technically in bed, but close enough) as a matter of fact.

...and the limited functions they do perform now are trouble-filled and unreliable.

What color is the sky in your world???

My 505 does every single function I want of it: it displays ebooks. It doesn't try to be a tablet (I don't need one) or a netbook (I already have one) or anything else. It's an ebook reader. It performs the functions of an ebook reader. And "trouble-filled"? I've never had a moment's trouble with it. The closest it comes to "unreliable" is every few weeks the battery starts to get low, so I plug it in to charge for a few hours. I wish my netbook or my laptop could go that long.

The comparison is very simple: 1) What do you have to do to get text on your computer screen? 2) What do you have to do to get the same text on your e-reader?

Well, if I want good text on my computer screen, I alt-click the filename to download it and fire up calibre to read it. If I want it on my ebook reader, I plug in said reader, click on the book title, and click "send to device".

I don't find plugging in my reader and sending it a file to be onerous. Yes, it does take some time to re-index its files afterward, but given that I have several thousand books on there, this isn't all that surprising; I just let it do that while I'm grabbing a quick shower or something.

Just consider Google books, gutenberg.org, public libraries, PDFS, without even taking into account all the other stuff computers can do. All of these present no problem for netbooks/tablets but huge problems for e-readers...

Are we even talking about the same devices?

Seriously, "huge problems for e-readers"? Project Gutenberg? PDF files? (I don't borrow library ebooks, so someone else will have to address that) Maybe you've got some strange device or something, but PG and its fellow public-domain sites are what my reader does. I buy books, too, mostly from Baen, Smashwords, and O'Reilly, but 95% of my books are from PG, here on MR, Feedbooks, ManyBooks, or Google (except when Google's "text" is a hideously bad OCR, but nothing, not even my computer, can make sense of that). I have piles of PDFs -- including my books-wanted list, which I update on a regular basis -- and the only ones my 505 has issues with are the ones that aren't text at all, but just images of pages: those run into problems with resizing. I understand newer models don't have that problem.

Originally Posted by mdmorrissey

It is you who are missing the point. I see that you have the same device I do (PB 360), which I have had to send back for repair (or hopefully my money back) for the third time in less than a year. So much for "excelling" at what they are meant to do.

So you have a wonky device, and you think this means that everyone else does too and we're all just lying about it?

Why am I even continuing this conversation?

The main problem has been (probably) that they are "meant to display ebooks," which is to say, SELL ebooks.

Maybe you're not speaking English. That might explain it. No, that is not just to say they're meant to sell ebooks. I've never bought an ebook via my reader (it doesn't have that capability). My ebook reader is meant to display ebooks, which means to make them appear on its screen and be readable. I can't imagine why I would want one that couldn't do that.

If they had concentrated instead on simply transferring text (including ebooks) from computer screen to reader, I am certain much more progress would have been made -- including re the No. 1 priority of RELIABILITY.

You're going on about reliability again, as if the whole world shares your problem with a defective device (though, given what you're saying about returns, I'm starting to suspect it might be a PEBKAC error). No. It doesn't. They are in fact RELIABLE. I've had my PRS-505 for going on two years now, and it has never given me a moment's trouble. It has never hinted at suggesting a thought of anything less than perfect reliability. And not only is my experience at least as typical as yours, but given the shortage of failure reports among the hundred thousand or so MR members, I'd say it's more typical.

Transferring text from screen to device is a software issue. Calibre does that for me. I don't even use Sony's own software. And given the several thousand ebooks I have on there, I seem to be able to do it without difficulty. I'm sorry to hear that you're having a problem with that, just as you're having a reliability problem, but I really don't think the device can be blamed.

It is far from "trivial to convert any text found on the net into an ebook any reader can display." First of all, most of what is on the net (e.g., Google books, not to mention PDFs and web pages) cannot be downloaded (by non-geeks), though it can be read easily online.

Most of what is on the net that people want to read on their ebook readers can be downloaded very nicely and very easily by non-geeks. Google books have that handy "download" link and a choice of PDF or epub. As for Web pages ... well, I have no interest in reading them on a 6" screen, but if I did, calibre could do it.

Second, Even if you can convert it in Calibre and download it to your ereader without further formatting (hardly "trivial"), you can't read it with anything like the ease of a computer.

How is it not trivial? Conversion: right-click and choose the desired option from the menu. On the very rare occasions I've needed to read something that wasn't epub or PDF, that was utterly trivial. Transfer: click the title and "send to device" from the big buttons. Reading it with the ease of a computer? I can't conveniently read my netbook in bed (I've tried). I certainly can't lug my desktop there. Neither one will, unlike my PRS-505, go into a large pocket. When it comes to displaying books -- to doing what it was intended to do, namely text -- I'll take the 505 over the computer every time. And that's not due to a shortage of computers.

There are problems everywhere, with page-turning, with navigation generally, bookmarking, note-taking, dictionaries, etc. -- things that are no problem at all on the computer.

Page-turning? Press the "next page" button.
Navigation? Press and hold "next" to skip pages. "Menu" takes you up a level. Etc. How is this hard?
Bookmarking? Press the "bookmark" button.
Note-taking? I don't take notes while I'm reading. (note: I'm not using my 505 for any classes; if I were, I'd have bought one with a keyboard)
Dictionaries? I feel as much need for a dictionary at my fingertips as I ever did with pbooks, which is to say none at all.
Despite your insistence on "problems everywhere", I find problems nowhere. My ebook reader is like a book, except that it contains about 2500 books for me to choose from.

Dude, I don't know what you want, but it isn't an ebook reader. And you're not going to convince the members of MobileRead that we're delusional or demented. We like our ebook readers. They display books for us. That's what we want them to do. We have no problems putting any books we want on our readers so we can read those books. And while some of us are those you scoff at as "geeks", most aren't (and, in fact, would have more problems with a netbook or a tablet). And, as we're mostly not prone to ID-ten-tee errors, they work.