Quote:
Originally Posted by dmaul1114
There aren't that many people who read enough to justify buying a dedicated eReader ....
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I have a lawyer friend who says that the vast majority (almost all) their paperwork now comes through e-mail as PDFs.
As you might guess, they print all that dreck off, use it for the course of whatever trial or meetings it pertains to, and then, as you might again guess, they toss it: they have the PDFs for filing purposes.
They don't just deal with them on laptops for the same reasons that most folks don't want to e-read anything else on a laptop: bulky, heavy, unsatisfactory battery life, the usual readability issues, etc.
I've discussed the idea of something that was about clipboard sized that would allow him to read those PDF files, maybe even make notes, was easier on the eyes and ran for a full day or three on a charge. His reaction was ... well, let's just call it "positive."
The same factors would make such a device similarly attractive to doctors, professors, anyone who
still deals with lots of paper in our eco-friendly "paperless" society.
Don't get me wrong, I'm extremely pleased to have a smaller sized device for leisure reading, but the
real market here is professional use. The thing that's held them back from hitting that market is most likely the lack of availability of large enough eInk panels to hit that clipboard-size target. The anticipated 9.7" panels are still a
mite on small side, but with a margin auto-crop function it'd be close enough.
Would such a device be expensive? Absolutely, at first anyway, but consider that the largest factor that brought personal computer prices down from their original, astronomically high prices was the demand from the business world.