[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by BlackVoid

I do not read books on my computer and I do not work / browse the web with my Reader. Sorry but your comparison is not valid.

But some of us do, or would if we had a reader/web-browser combination.

A 6" screen is not good for books with pictures anyway. For that a premium large size device - like a color Iliad would be best.

Depends on the pictures. A 4x6" screen could show a photograph just fine--and could certainly show bar or pie charts, or sections of wiring diagrams that are color coded. We have a growing number of people willing to watch movies on a 2" screen. Certainly 4x6 can show plenty of useful image content.

I've seen entire conversations take place on Livejournal through 100 pixel icons--people reply with no words, just the picture-of-choice as a comment. Currently, those conversations aren't convertable to useful ebook format.

Black-and-white works just fine for paperback books, and has been the standard for most books for centuries. But that doesn't mean color is a useless affectation; a number of technical texts are fairly useless without it. While most of them have less than 16 and often less than 8 shades, it's still true that for most of us, it's a lot easier to spot the difference between "red" and "blue" than between "75% grey" and "62.5% grey."

eInk is too slow for computers in my opinion

Technical limitation; could change drastically in a couple of years. (And remember: people were active online with 1200 baud modems. If the content's worth getting, they'll put up with speed issues--until they fix them.)

For learning, paper is much much more practical. You can annotate, navigation is much faster, getting an overview is much easier. You cannot beat paper for learning.

These days, I prefer to learn from PDFs on a computer screen--I can bookmark, annotate, highlight, create links to other pages or files, search for the passage I want, print the images out larger so I can see the fine details, extract a few pages into a separate file for side-by-side comparison, and instantly switch between the document itself and a Google search for references or related content.

I don't expect the general public to take up Acrobat Pro as an educational tool, but that doesn't mean "paper is superior." Paper, these days, is what I tolerate if I can't get an ebook.

I am more worried about all the different proprietary formats, DRM, narrow selection of books (compared to paper), lack of proper handling of multiple formats, and high prices of ebooks. These are the real dangers for ebook devices and not an OLED computer / reader.

This, I pretty much agree with. High ebook prices combined with the claim that they're "licenced," not "sold," is going to continue to prevent them from being widely used. Am hoping for a lawsuit that chops holes in DRM methods (a nice precedent that allowed that people are legally allowed to crack it for personal use as allowed by copyright law would be all that's necessary, and it's in the making), and for a couple more publishers to follow Baen's lead and realize that people really will pay a few bucks for digital AND pay more for the paper copy of the same thing. And that many more people will take free digital editions and remember that author & publisher the next time they're in a bookstore, and purchase something else by the same people.