|
This discussion is bit silly. Of course, given the advances in disk and memory capacity we can certainly afford the luxury of keeping an entire library on a single SD card or whatever will come in the future. If we can load our computer disks with may Gb of media files then why not our eReaders as well. In fact, that is supposed to be one of the main advantages, the huge capacity.
That being said, I wouldn't expect from a version 1.0 be it Cybook or any other eReader to support large libraries very well from day 1. It is clear that Cybook at least lacks the commands for proper searching, indexing and general organization of many books. So while one could/would/want to use a higher capacity SD card, today it is not very practical.
For the time being we have to compromise by keeping a shorter TODO reading lists books in eReader while the main library remains hosted in PCs. As for security and accidental loss issues with SD cards, I just assumed that everyone makes backup copies of their content on PCs and other disks. So you can loose/break entire eReader, it shouldn't be a big deal so long as you have reasonably updated backups.
Now as to the question of big libraries needing a lot of space. The general literature most of us use is very compact so clearly you can stuff many books even into 2 Gb. I don't even remember what is mine (likely 1 Gb) and certainly I am not even close to its limits. However, things change when you consider other content.
Consider technical journals, reference manuals that may include diagrams. Also many textbooks for schools have a lot of images, diagrams, etc. So there is plenty of content that is not compact. Now you may read many manuals and articles which you wish to keep for a long time as you may need to refer to it at some point during your work. Maybe you are a reaseacher at a university, a student, designer, etc. You will likely have a larger library of reference material that requires more space. At some point in the future when eInk is so advanced it can even handle video, you may even want to store some video clips. Therefore, I could easily see how 4 Gb may not be enough.
The trouble is that the present devices, with a possible exception of Iliad, are not good enough for such content. Clearly you want a larger screen to examine diagrams and images. For maps you'd probably like colour as well. So we are talking about at least 10" colour screen. It is certainly not a pocket device.
Next you are absolutely dependent on excellent searching facilities and good index commands. If you have a lot of reference content then the device *MUST* be able to help you find it. I imagine that Cybook will offer a USB port for keyboard and mouse in the future that can be used with a fancy seach interface.
Clearly this will be a higher end eReader which is simply not available today. I don't think the current Cybook is even close. So there is not much point loading a bunch of content into it when the device cannot handle it properly.
In any case I assume it won't take them long to add support for larger cards. So it is only matter of time.
|