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Old 07-08-2015, 06:25 PM   #41
eschwartz
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Location: The Beaten Path, USA, Roundworld, This Side of Infinity
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Quote:
Originally Posted by patrickt View Post
I wonder what innovation people want. Do that want the exciting buttons for turning pages? Would that be innovation. I want to read books. I can't imagine a big innovation that I want to pay for. I don't need color. I don't want a 8x10 inch screen and certainly wouldn't want to pay for one. I don't want sound since I have a cell phone that I can use for audiobooks. But, a bigger screen, page-turn buttons, and sound aren't innovations. They're things Kindles had and abandoned. Oh, the amazing innovation of a mechanical keyboard, perhaps.

I'm admittedly not a technically savvy as some so let me know what innovations we're waiting for.
Shh!!!! We weren't supposed to notice that!

As a matter of fact, I think you have nailed the big ones.
As fjtorres pointed out, some people want mandatory worship at the EPUB Temple.
Also, E-Ink tablets for reading books on the holy grail of Android. Whyever that might be important.

And you are also correct that it is factually improper to name any of those, save for color displays, as "innovation".
But funnily enough, the US companies are closer than anyone else (which is saying very little) to developing color displays. I don't see a lot of innovation outside the USA on that front.
But I am pretty sure we weren't supposed to mention that either.


Bottom line -- US companies pioneered and obsoleted -- according to their own highly subjective reckonoing, which is all that matters -- every feature currently touted as European "innovations".

The word phrase you are looking for is not "innovation", it is "maintenance of niche items". And as noted above, there are good reasons why those have been abandoned by the US market.

And innovation, for what it is worth, is in this case fundamentally of an incremental nature.
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