@JSWolf: I guess a 9,7'' device with touchscreen and wifi would be perfekt for an educational usage.
Why the wifi? It makes it so much easier to e.g. distribute stuff.
Why the touchscreen? Should be fairly obvious. You simply need to be able to annotate your books, papers, etc
Think of the possibilities!
And ... reader software needs to be adopted to the way people read long papers. When you e.g. have a large bundle of paper and you know "somewhere in the middle is that freaking page".
You thumb it ub and shuffle through. You dont want to load every single page.
So you would need "page thumbnails", jumping via pressing on a line (more to the left or more to the right?), bookmarks with your own keys, etc - and the option to upload those bookmarks to another ereader. Lets say 20 people are working on a single project. They have some kind of "project paper folder" with ~1.000 pages. Now ... if person A inserts a bookmark or a comment - he needs the possibility to share this bookmark automatically with the team.
Talk about an interface to a document-management-system.
Like that idea? Give me a reader with touchscreen and I develop such a system...
Dont like that idea? Give me a reader with touchscreen and I can figure out why it is not such a good idea
No, seriously, let me explain what I meant with an exemplary usage.
Imagine a federal (or universitary or whatever) commission who needs to review project application. Lets say the commission consists of 12 persons. Everybody needs to review every application and they meet once per month to discuss those applications.
Lets say they have x00 applications per year, each having between 12 and 1200 pages.
Now .. an eReader would give those persons the possibility to have those applications with them wherever they go, annotate those papers and share those annotations with others quite easily. It would in fact allow a much faster and cheaper handling then normal paper.
But - those persons wouldnt want to worry about battery power over the weekend. They want to be able to flip pages, insert (and read) bookmarks, wildly jump between applications, etc
They dont care about SD-cards - they wanna get those applications easily without any hazzle. They wanna share their notes without the need to run some strange scripts. etc
Then we have someone running that commission, doing all that daily stuff. Well, this person perhaps has to shortly review applications for correctness before the members of the commission get the paper? Perhaps he uses a database to handle the applications - and he surely want the eReader to interact with this database.
And yes, this I a real commission I based my example on. The average commission member is nearly 60 years old, is not interested in computers and has too much to do to accept any kind of errenous interface.
Keep them in mind if you think about a new eReader for professional usage. If they accept your device - and that commission can use it - I know thousands of people who would use such devices for professional use.
Sorry for the OT ..