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Originally Posted by wgrimm
I am amazed that Sony could make their readers so "un-ergonomic." Lovely screen and great battery life, but crappy design.
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Hmm, most folks seem to find the design pretty nice, though no-one says it's perfect.
What do you find so nonergonomic? Just out of curiousity, you understand.
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Originally Posted by wgrimm
Make it hard for readers to put their own content on a device, you will fail. Why is it so hard for the manufacturers to realize this?
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I find the RTF option to be pretty suitable for my needs of putting my own content on my reader. Sure the PDF support is problematic, to put it mildly, but that's really more an issue with PDF's not being re-flowable. A problem, but not one that Sony really can control. A more flexible zoom/pan arrangement would help, but I think I'd find it more of a pain than a help.
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Originally Posted by wgrimm
maybe add a backlight.
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Can't
backlight it, e-ink is
opaque. Front-lighting like a
LightWedge type of approach would work, but the battery life would suffer massively. It's a trade-off.
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Originally Posted by wgrimm
Give away good conversion software- html, chm, etc. to Sony format so that people can put their own content on the device.
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That would be nice for some things (like files with in-line pix), but I find that RTF handles upwards of 99% of what I need
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Originally Posted by wgrimm
Release specs on the OS for developers and on the file formats used.
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Well, the OS is Linux, and we've got most of the specs on it (they've been out since the Librie, more or less), enough that there's a good hacking effort underway in the
Developer's Corner of MobileRead.
They've said they'll release full BBeB specs, but you're right that they haven't done so yet.
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Originally Posted by wgrimm
Work with publishers to offer a wide selection of ebooks online, and to price these fairly.
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In all fairness, that's what Sony is
trying to do. Sure, the Connect store needs lots and lots of work to make it what you could call 'user friendly' without starting a laugh riot, but they're trying to work with the Pubs, and offer a wide range of content. Actually, others are disgusted with them for handling the Reader and the Content both, so I guess they're gonna draw fire on that whatever they do.
As for the pricing, while I agree that it's still got a ways to go, the Publishers tell them what they have to charge, so there again, it's not really Sony's fault -- they have to choose to sell for the Pub-mandated price, or have less content to offer. It seems they've decided to have as much content as they can so that the e-reading/reader thing can have a better chance of catching on. If that happens, the prices ought to come down on both content and hardware, but we early adoptors are the ones who make the investment in that future vision. Comes with the territory.