[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by rolexconfuse

Is it really that hard for big companies to make a good reader for textbooks & pdfs? Or companies just lazy?

Some features are either hard to make or hard to support; others appeal to too small a market niche to be worth the investment & production resources.

All the big players are either making 6 inch e-ink devices or tablets.

Is it really that hard to do this?

1. E-ink screen size equal to text book page diagonally

Give us a number--what size "text book" are you talking about?
Bigger e-ink screens are more fragile; more screen size = more ereaders broken by accident. Laptops manage by folding the screen away (and not having it handled while in use); iPads manage by being heavy, which is a mark against portability. Also, the technology to make e-ink isn't cheap, and small apparent shifts in size use a lot more area. Also, a big ereader no longer fits in a pocket or purse; the iPad is about the limit of a portable device.

This is a matter of price, sustainable market (people don't buy tech that keeps breaking on them), and niche--the market for "electronic novel-sized device that holds hundreds of novels" is huge; the market for "electronic letter-page sized device that weighs more than a pound" is much smaller.

2. focus making page turning really fast
3. use a good/fast processor (and not something that's okay or passable)

I assure you this is done at the current limits of the technology. Processor speeds are balanced against the size limitations of what they're included in; pages turn as fast as the hardware & software can make them. If you have methods by which either of these can be notably improved, I'm sure several technology companies would be happy to hire you.

4. 1 gig ram (stop with the barely getting by or workable)

If all it's doing is reading books, it doesn't need much ram. Why waste a lot of capacity on a device that can't use it? RAM is not the limiting factor in ereaders.

Current ereaders have up to 256mb RAM. Some have as little as 32mb; those can be a bit slow--but there's no particular reason to have 1gb RAM; the reason the Kindle wants 256mb is that it needs to support wireless activity in the background.

5. light weight (no more than 1lb)

Clashes with your desire for a large screen. Pick one or the other.

6. Don't need the battery life to last 1 month. 2 weeks is good, this is for educational use not for a trip to the safari/jungle

There is no difference between a 2-week battery and a 1-month battery; e-ink with no wireless can be either. (E-ink battery life is measured in page flips, not hours; time estimates of weeks are dependent on an expected average number of pages.)

The issue is whether the battery life will be measured in "many days" (e-ink) or "many hours" (anything else.) Eink doesn't support good color, and many academic resources are going to want color support--which means a battery life measured in hours. (Unless you go for larger units with space for more powerful batteries, which means losing the "lightweight & portable" aspects.)

[quote]7. A physical button for TOC. no more digging around the menus.

8. A "reference" button that lets you jump back and forth between 2 books. Ex. you're readingbook A but you need to reference something in book B. Normally you'd have to go through the menu system/home screen to do this. But now you press the "reference" button and you're back to the previous book and on to the same page. You set the 2 books you want to jump between.['quote]

Nice thoughts, good for academic & business use, useless for leisure reading. (Also: A TOC button would mean making it blatantly obvious how many documents are made without a TOC. While the user may grumble at the publisher for releasing them that way, they'll also grumble at the ereader company for misleading them into thinking the TOC button would be useful, when mostly it's not.)

The "reference" thing, toggling between two books, has a problem: How do you set the books? Is it the last two you've opened, or can you change that? If it's only the last two, that's not particularly useful except when you are comparing exactly two books (if you need a third one, moving back & forth between them will be a hassle). Any options other than "click this button to go back to the last page in the book you had open before this one" involve complex "teach the end user how to use this device"--which means it's going to mostly be ignored.

Features only usable by part of the market are less likely to get made.

9. A physical wheel or slider that allows you to skim through pages/chapters. You set the amount of pages/chapters to skim through. Each time you flick the wheel/slider it skips X pages. Each time you push and hold the wheel/slider it skips x chapter. Image you were reading a textbook and needed to go back 7 pages for something. You would have to click 7 times back and then 7 times forward to get back to your current location. That's 14 clicks just to re-read something in a textbook. I mean in a real book when you're looking for something you don't flip page by page, you either flip section by section or chunks of pages at a time.

I would really love this. I can see that allowing a variable page skip amount is too complicated to code (not too complex to make, but too complex to make accessible to users; there's no way to make it intuitive enough to be widely used), but I'd love to see a "hold this button to flash through pages one at a time." However, I can also see that that's a battery-draining activity that's not useful or desirable to most readers, just one more way to accidentally kill your battery by pressing on the wrong spot on the reader.

10. better bookmarking. When I book mark something I want to know what the heck I bookmarked. Give me the ability to name the bookmark

Again: Complex features that you have to explain how to use. The ebook market is dominated by people who can't figure out how to download books to their computers and load them onto their devices; coping with bookmark programming is well beyond them. (Which means: this is a feature that costs money to make, but most ebook customers won't care about. Not a good marketing approach.)

Also: in order to name the bookmarks, you need a method for inputting data. Add a keyboard? Size & fragility. Touchscreen keyboard & stylus? More software. Handwriting? Even more problematic.

11. annotations

Same problem, only moreso--need a way to input data and a way to retrieve it. (You were thinking the annotations could be exported, right?)

Please no extra junk that interferes with the reading experience
- no mp3 player
- no Wi-Fi
- no web browsing
- no apps

MP3 players cost almost nothing to add, and almost nothing in hardware to support. Including it allows for audiobooks and the option of a tts reader for people with limited vision.

While I do fine without wifi, as an academic reader, allowing limited browsing is very useful. Most college students expect to have near-constant internet access; removing it from their ereader means they also have to carry their laptop. That means in order for the ereader to be useful, it has to be much better than a laptop for ebooks, because they won't want to carry two devices to class.

While you can make it with no apps included, unless you play the total-walled-garden game, you can't make it incompatible with apps. The PRS+ hack for the Sony allows sudoku, and that's for a device with no internet and no intentional space at all for games.

TL;DR ANSWER:
Yes, those really are complicated features that there's not enough market demand to support. While students and some businesspeople would love a reader with those features, the expected over $500 cost for a device that doesn't even play YouTube videos is not likely to be successful.

There have been attempts in the past to make more academically-supportive ereaders; they've failed for lack of marketability. It's *hard* to make something useful to a tech-needy niche market and keep the price within their range.