Quote:
Originally Posted by daudi
I don't know much about the size of the market that something like the iliad needs to be successful, but the student market could potentially be quite useful. I have recently found out that the library at the University where I work is testing the iliad expecting that they could quite quickly have a large demand for material made available via the iliad. And there's a steady somewhat predictable flow through of students and therefore new students who could need an iliad.
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oh, i agree completely (that's the reason i like the thing so much myself).. but the cost atm is still fairly prohibitive.. maybe if universities (especially the faculties that require you to read lots) could try to make available more e-book versions of whatever books they want students to read, this would really provide an incentive for students to get one compared to getting a paper copy, or reading the library version.. the only way you can get (serious) books now is if someone is kind enough to either OCR them (the scanned PDFs are nice, but 20-100mb per book with no text recognition is pretty useless)..
i can sometimes get pdf versions of books from some of my teachers, or from certain websites that shall not be mentioned, but non-fiction content availability is still pretty spotty, and the reading quality is generally rather poor.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MarkRPenn
You are joking, right?
Firstly, we are not just talking about margin notes in textbooks here - we're taliking about general note taking - using the iLiad as a notebook. Virtually every occupation uses notebooks!
Secondly, even if we were talking about just annotation, it's far from limited to academia. I don't know a single engineer who doesn't write all over his installation and maintenance manuals, or drawings, or even sales literature. Same applies to just about any profession that uses reading material. If they don't do it now, it's only because they'd be destroying a valuable paper copy (I'm often asked not to draw on an engineering drawing as it's "our only copy"), which is an obstacle removed by the iLiad.
Add to that anyone who ever has to fill in a report of any kind (think service engineers), and you can see that the "the market is limited to academia" argument makes no sense at all.
Mark
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interesting.. although both your assumptions seem to presuppose either fairly affluent people being interested (engineers), or companies realizing the potential (and buying it for their employees), which would depend on their seeing that there are obvious advantages to using the iLiad compared to 'normal' paper for notating..
I hadn't yet thought of taking something like lecture notes on this thing yet, but i suppose it would work very well (and better the more people start using it, as sharing the notes would quickly become easier)..
However, the thing isn't being marketed (here) like that at all (yet?), probably because of the price.. which is a real shame.