A short aside...
I'm sure Roland will make note of the input regarding the review style. But, personally, I think either style (informal-personal-fair or formal-facts-only) is fine. We are fortunate to be getting such great information from Roland. He is clearly being both fair and helpful in his approach, and is not trying to further any separate secret agendas. He's simply providing information in a personal style to the community for our benefit, and succeeding magnificently. If he was intending to publish the review at the WSJ, I'm sure his writing style would be different.
As it is, the advantage of his style is exactly what was indicated before - it's more personal and informative. It gives impressions as well as facts. For those of us that want to get a feel for the relative merits of a device we might never have the opportunity to hold in our hands, it works well. It does benefit the community greatly. And, of course, he is most welcome to compare to devices he is familiar with.
I believe he already made that very clear in the
beginning,
Quote:
First of all, I'd like to make a few things clear:
1) As with the Iliad deal, I don't get paid for what I do here. I'm trying to make an independent review here, for the community, not for the company.
2) Staretek has provided the review unit free of charge. I did not have to pay a single penny for either the device or the shipping to Germany. For this I'd like to thank those responsible at Staretek and especially Ivan who was always very helpful.
3) I will compare the device to the Iliad from time to time. I know that the devices are completely different, but there are still some things that can be compared, like reading ebooks on the devices. I think it makes sense to compare, even if this is far from a apples to apples comparison.
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I know that not everyone will agree with my thoughts here. We have a very diverse group, and as I have said in the past, that's one of our great strengths at MobileRead. We'll have different opinions about writing styles. But I hope we won't all get too distracted with style issues and miss the whole point. We are getting a nice glimpse of an exciting new device, with good and bad, and with comparisons to another device that some of us might be familiar with.
So let's get back to the device itself, okay!?