Quote:
Originally Posted by Robertb
Dear Pkovak and Community:
On January 2, I head to Storage Visions and then the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. There we will be meeting with our own factories and eBook Reader factories from around the world. The key question on everyone's agenda is to find WHAT to add to the next generation or two of eBook Readers that we will develope. I already know there is a lot of interest in the Epson Controller (coming) amd the 9.7 inch size (sooner or later). This forum has some of the finest minds in the world regartding eBook Readers... yet most of you have jobs that are in entirely different fields.
I would like to invite you to tell me what you wish for both short term and long term. This can be as simple as "an LED light that is on a gooseneck and is retractible into the case" or a "solar charger" or plastic display or color screen (not yet possible in E-Ink but worth discussing) and anything else including snowflake finish). I cannot guarantee results but I can get you factual answers.
This THREAD needs to ramp up again. I know it is the holidays; but I invite you to put your thinking cap on and be as bold or far out as you want to be. Get some factual answers; or provide some answers to Astak!
Robert B  |
RobertB:
Here is my view, as best as I see it. I own 1 LCD e-book reader (Cybook Gen 1) and 2 different e-ink based readers - Cybook gen 3 and Bebook. I have two set of observations.
Set 1: There are at least 3 different market rolled up into one in the e-book business.
1.) Professionals - They need large, fast, PDF readers as most of their professional work is tied to charts, tables, graphs, and illustrations. Other formats are nice, but PDF is king. This market is small but not nearly as price sensitive as the other two markets. Battery time is important to this market, as is easily replacable batteries. Irex is the dominate player in this market.
2. Students - have similar needs as professionals, but extremely price sensitive. Likes a all-in-one approach, and often substitutes a laptop for an e-book reader for cost and flexibility reasons. PDF reading also critical, but with more emphasis on other formats. The closest to a dominate player in this market is a light laptop.
3. Pleasure readers. This is the big market of e-book readers. PDF is not particularly important to these readers. Size and weight are determining factors, as well as access to a large variety of e-books. A variety of format supported is important to these readers, with excellent support of the major open-format (non encrypted) format a must, as well as excellent support of at least one major DRM'ed format. Currently,
NO MANUFACTURER meets the market needs today.
Set 2: Everybody on the manufacturer is hooked on the I-tunes (DRM) model. They only offer robust software for the DRM books they sell/support. So SONY has a real good LRF reader, Cybook gen 3 has a real good Mobipocket reader, and frankly, I'm not sure what Bebooks is robust in (I think Fbreader2). The Kindle goes the whole hog and only (offically) supports its own DRM'ed AWZ format. Yet there is over 25,000 titles on open-source formats like .TXT and HTML. None of the above reader offer robust software support for those format, or even somewhat lesser ones, such as RTF.
In my honest opinion, this is a self-defeating engineering idea. Yes, provide ease-of-use, (the kindle has the best for that, and no reason no to ape it, if possible) but don't forget the open-source public domain. Could a manufacturer who is doing a one button buy/download not check (and maybe cough up some money) to rig a one-button download from Project Gutenberg?
If you're just selling hardware, letting your customer download free PD e-books shouldn't matter to you, and gives you a marketing edge over the DRM focused hardware makers. But it isn't just downloading. Your e-book reader must have robust support of open-source formats. That means embedded images, different fonts, accurate hyphenation (or no hyphenation at all) and special characters. Nobody does this in the e-ink world. (Well maybe Irex, at a very high price.)
I guess this thread has slowed down as most of us get tired of crankiong the same record over and over....
P.S. One last thing, with the Google/American Writers Guild settlement, setting up a one button download to Google e-books is going to give
somebody a big marketing advantage....If you have the reader software to handle whatever format they will be made available in...