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I was curious why many people think a built-in dictionary is a selling feature for bookreader devices?

To me, it just represents increased cost that I wouldn't appreciate (cost to license the dictionary, cost for more memory to hold it, cost to develop the UI/indexing for it).

I read mostly Gutenberg and other free books, and I can't remember the last time I came across a word I didn't recognize. Assuming we are all avid readers (and we must be to consider paying a few hundred dollars for a book reading device) surely we have a wide enough vocabulary to require very, very few dictionary references.

The only application I see is for multi-lingual dictionaries, where one reads in a foreign or less familiar language.