Thread: Astak Mentor eBook readers with WiFi and Touchscreen (read-only)
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Old 12-06-2008, 02:40 AM   #1120
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Posts: 370
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Join Date: Feb 2008
Location: Melbun
Device: Kobo H2O
Quote:
Originally Posted by Robertb View Post
I would like to invite you to tell me what you wish for both short term and long term.
Finding myself unexpectedly in the market for a replacement for my lost 505, I have to say I'm hanging out for the 9" reader from you lot. Really, really hanging out! I'm mostly a recreational reader, and I'm (re)discovering just how much I read. Specifically, how much weight of deadwood I have to carry when I travel if I don't have a liseuse.

Immediately I'd like:
  • easy to use both left and right handed - I use whichever hand is free to hold the reader when I'm in bed or leaning on a wall.
  • good library support - no point holding 1000 books if there's no reasonable way to find one of them - Sony has this problem in spades
  • Ability to mark/move/delete books once they're read [1].
  • Calibre support. I don't care if you have to kidnap him and hold him in your secret underground dungeon. Well, I do, but seriously, bribe the guy or whatever it takes. Calibre is *good*
  • PDF (and other formats) margin-trimming. I didn't pay for pixels so some monkey could leave them as whitespace. Editable CSS and/or editable defaults would be nice.
  • battery life - longer is better. Look, on a 9" display you've got the space to include two or more of the tiny slim batteries. Use it. Make them optional if you want, but let people like me put all four in there and run for a month.
  • A cover that has a rigid panel covering the screen would be excellent. Just to make the device better protected when I dump it in my bag.
  • Adding a small solar panel to the inside of that cover would be a nice touch, provided there's a cable and it's easy to separate the two so I can read and charge at the same time. The junk Chinese-eBay 80mW panels are not worth the paper they're printed on, give me a four-six hour charge in full sun and a 5 year warranty on the cells.
  • Formats... I don't care, as long as Calibre can export something usable to the device. Especially font and whitespace settings - I currently use 7.2 point serif text with *no* surrounding whitespace and if I could turn off the extra new pages Calibre adds I would (chapter detection)
  • A touchscreen without wireless option. I only want a touchscreen if I can draw using it, and I definitely want to turn it off the other 99% of the time.
  • a light only if it works better than a headtorch. I already have a headtorch that gets more than 100 hours off three AAA batteries, and it's next to my bed.

Longer term... I think I've said. Broadly, a somewhat beefy netbook sized thing with an eink screen that's designed for reading but has enough networking grunt (and a small keyboard/LCD) to act as a cellphone using bluetooth and diary. But that might come only when eink hits smartphones. Who knows.

[1] Paying 3-20 seconds every time I guess wrong about whether I have already read something is annoying (I tend to buy the whole oeuvre if I like a book, so I get lost often too). Adding last access time, page number and time to the book list would be useful. Don't do the Sony thing of using a giant font because there's only 10 buttons and you feel you need to fill up the screen. Sony let you type in numbers to skip to a page, why not to select a book? Display as many as the screen will hold (for that matter, give us lots/some/few display options akin to thumbnail sizes).
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