|
A lot of reasons are given in this thread and other threads for the demise of buttons and, reading through it, I suspect they're all partly true, but I also wonder if they miss the point. I don't have a bit of insight into what the designers of the various ereaders were thinking but my guess is that touch screens didn't replace buttons at all; that buttons went away because of touch screens.
When I'm reading I make heavy use of the dictionary. I have a decent vocabulary but I'm a diverse reader and a lot of stuff I read is about concepts I don't know well or at all. That always means new words and old words used in new ways, and I love looking them up. I also like that I can look up concepts and facts on wikipedia as I read. I do a lot of that. That's exactly why I have a 3G Kindle. I rarely use the 3G for downloading.
I also use search a lot because I tend to forget character names.
Anyway these things are far, far easier on a touch screen and I think that's why today's ereaders have touch screens. Anybody who had a Kindle 4 probably remembers how painful a process it was to look up a word or do a search or look up a concept. Move the cursor here and there on the pop-up keyboard or to the word you want to look up and then press start select and drag the cursor and then press end select and on and on and if I keep talking about it I'll have nightmares tonight.
Before that, when I had a Kindle Keyboard things were slightly less painful but they still hurt.
I suspect these are the reasons that we have touch screens. And since touch screens are more expensive and ereader prices are now less than they used to be, they left out the also fairly expensive page turn buttons.
I'd be very surprised if touch screens were added to replace the buttons. I think it's probably the other way around.
As for eating while reading, that's a snap! I do it all the time. I just make sure my little finger stays grease-free. Nothing to it.
When I first got my Voyage I experimented with the Page Press and I thought my experiments showed it to work remarkably well. I didn't buy it because of that feature and I didn't expect it to work as well as it does. But when I was reading and not experimenting it just never occurred to me to use them. I've been swiping for so long it's come to seem more natural. After a week or two I turned off Page Press. It just wasn't useful to me.
I think it would be nice if there was a model to suit each taste. One with page turn buttons, one with TTS, one with a larger screen, etc. The problem is that we're cheap. We want cheap devices and the only way they can make them is to subsidize them with book sales. Device manufacturers simply can't compete in ebook readers as they do in tablets. I wish they could. Personally I'd be willing to pay a lot to get the ereader I really want. Probably a lot of people in here would. But we're the devotees. The casual readers; the general public wants cheap ereaders so that's what we get and cheap means less variety.
It's not as bad as it might be. These things really are good. But they could be better, and better for all of us, not just people like me who happen to like what we're getting.
Barry
|