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Originally Posted by Laurens
My personal theory is that people are more interested in dedicated devices (i.e. gadgets that do one particular function and do it well, in this case internet browsing) than "jack of all trades" like PDAs. Just witness the success of the iPod and the buzz around the Sony Reader and iRex Iliad.
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I would agree that the iPod does one thing and does it well, and that that accounts for part of its success.
But if all the Sony Reader does is read e-books, why do you exclude children's books, photographic books, books with animations, and books, magazines and newspapers that include color illustrations? Not to mention websites converted to e-book format for reading offline. If these are electronic, aren't
they e-books too?
How can we say it does it well, if we mean "provides for reading electronic texts" and, on the one hand we exclude so many types of material we want to read, and on the other Sony is trying to force its own new DRMed format onto people. And although we're reading electronic texts on Sony's electronic reader, we can't link any references in these e-books to the greatest electronic resource of all, the internet.
I wrote my opinion on the performance aspect at Teleread, in a piece called "How single-purpose e-readers fail" (
www.teleread.org/blog/?p=4094), and David Rothman and others there have written about the DRM side.
To quote myself, "The 'single purpose' that the Sony Reader is designed for is to read black-and-white texts that might contain crude black-and-white images."
I guess for Sony e-books means "electronic paperbacks."
To me, an e-reader that does its job well would at least be able to be used in schools, with textbooks (color illustrations on every spread through about the sixth grade, and mixed thereafter). To the current and earlier generations, "books" might mean "all-text books" but I think the next generation will think the definition includes communication in permanent form that utilizes illustration, motion, sound and interactivity.
For me, text will always be predominant in a book, even in one with these aspects. If it's not, then it's a multimedia thing, but hey, maybe "book" in the future won't have our traditional text bias but will just mean the package and single-purpose device that decodes it.