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Originally Posted by EowynCarter
Probably. And selling more E-book means the publishers making more of these. -> good.
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Yep. Even for those of us that want e-ink etc. it's good news as more people buying ebooks will get publishers putting out more, putting more effort into making them etc. etc.
Quote:
Originally Posted by TallMomof2
The biggest problem with tablets, IMO, is alpha-numeric input. I have one and there is no way that I can touch type with the onscreen keyboard. Handwriting recognition is so-so and not a decent alternative.
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They'll never really be for writing. They'll be for iPhone like functions. Surf the net, planner, watch videos, listen to music, read stuff. They're not meant to be a laptop replacement. For something like that they just need a tablet PC that works better and maybe has the screen detachable when you just want to use it as a tablet.
I don't really care about that stuff anyway. I don't want to use any future tablet device for writing etc. My university gives all professors a PC in their office and a laptop, so I'm covered on those grounds.
Any tablet I buy would be soley for net surfing, videos and maybe reading and marking up PDFs etc.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ankh
Mass production is already driving the price down. The magic number, today, is $200. If, in some foreseeable future, some of these "looks-like-a-letter-sized-transparency-foil" SF prototypes go bellow $100 or even lower than that...
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Price will help sales. But still even at $100 someone that only reads one or two books a year will never buy a dedicated reader. But they may buy those one or two books as ebooks if some other device they had for other reasons had good and easy to use reader functions built in. And getting the casual readers buying ebooks is key for the format to really succeed.
Quote:
Originally Posted by NatCh
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.
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Yep, I'm a professor and I still print out my PDFs of scholarly journal articles as I need to be able to quickly skim through and highlight stuff and jot notes in the margins. I also like being able to flip through them very quickly, which you can't do with an e-reader.
But I am very interested in a tablet device. If Apple (or someone else) can make stylus use/writing as intuitive as the finger touching is on the the iPhone it could be great for reading PDFs and taking notes right on the screen.
Current tablet PCs don't work well since the stylus just acts like a mouse rather than a touch screen stylus on a PDA etc.