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Originally Posted by Ddanndt
So I was just wondering if such an ebook reader exist and if not ,when are the Ereader companies going to realize that there is a market out there for academics/ students/ professionals ?  |
There isn't one yet. Some of that is tech/physical limitations--e-ink is fairly new, and getting it fast enough to do the rapid changes that academic use requires is just now becoming possible. (Even without flipping pages, jumping back and forth between pages and TOC and other books needs good processor speeds.)
E-ink is fragile; a screen big enough to comfortably show letter-sized PDFs is prone to breaking unless it's loaded with extra mass to protect it.
Non-e-ink is possible for academic use, although the battery life is a problem, because academic use is one of the cases where people really do want 8-16 hours of serious use away from an extension cord. The best current options are tablet computers, none of which are actually designed for academic use of books--the note-taking is rudimentary; switching between multiple books is a hassle (and not always possible; they have to all be in a limited range of filetypes to use the same program); bookmarking is limited and may not be exportable.
Most ebook software is designed with the notion that the books are your permanent library of leisure reading material. There's no good support for changing categories on the fly or connecting books to each other, and navigation inside a book is often limited to whatever the publisher arranged as for the TOC. There is no "skip to next page with a picture/chart." There is no "tag chapter 7 in that other book with a link to this one." There is no "sort by publisher/journal name/university source."
We may get these, but if we do, it'll probably be some hacker-student's pet project; there's been no interest from the mainstream hardware producer's side. Those who are aware of an academic interest seem to all have come at it from the angle of "we will provide a social networking site! And you will buy your ebooks through it, and then you can share your notes with each other!" No support for sideloaded books, and no features designed to make research work for a solitary person.