Quote:
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Originally Posted by negorv
Sony reader doesn't met my needs cause:
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The Reader doesn't meet your needs because it was designed to meet a
different set of needs than the ones you have. Kind of the same way a toaster doesn't meet my needs when I need to iron a shirt: no single tool can do every job.
It's not anything personal, and it's not because your needs are "wrong," or that you're too picky. It's not because your expectations are too high, or that you have a lot of material you need access to.The lack of international support is primarily a consequence of the fact that Sony doesn't have distribution rights for their books internationally. As big a target as they are, they have to show a pretty good measure of due diligence. It's not because they think everyone outside the U.S. is an intellectual property thief -- this is
Sony we're talking about
: their HQ is in
Tokyo, and their CEO is a
Welshman, they are the
definition of a multinational corporation, and not even one that started in the U.S.!
Are they hoping to sell ConnBooks? Absolutely! They
are in business to make money (just like everybody else), after all. Most of the books I'm reading on my Reader do not come from the ConnStore, but they're also not in PDF format, let alone A4 sized PDF format. It's certainly not Sony's fault that there is no standard format for electronic books -- there
is no such format. If such a format existed and they were still selling their LRF books, then they ought to be scourged and hung out to dry, but that's not what they're doing. And no, I don't consider PDF to be a standard format for e-books. It's a standard format for distributing documents electronically while preserving their page layouts. For it to be
any kind of
e-book format, it would need to support text re-flow without a bunch of acrobatics (you should pardon the pun), so that the files could be read on screens that are not, themselves, A4 in size. Of course, if it did that, it wouldn't be preserving the page layout, so it wouldn't be what
PDF is meant to be.
Looking at it from a consumer perspective, their selling books increases consumer interest in a reading device -- they've decided to take on
both of the twin pillars of resistance to e-books: lack of devices and lack of content. People won't buy devices until there's content, and they won't buy content until there're devices to read it on, further, devices that they
want to read that content on. Nobody has really made a substantial go at investing in creating both content and devices, and until e-ink, truly readable devices just weren't possible.
Is it any wonder that Sony didn't start with a "
Cray in a matchbox" type of approach for the device? They looked at it from a perspective of "what do we need for
reading a book, page by page, cover to cover?" And that is precisely what it does, and does very well. They never tried to make it out to be anything else, and pretty much all the reviews that spend most of their bashing the Reader for what it
isn't meant to be, have to admit in the end that it does what it
is meant to do quite well.
I'm genuinely sorry, negorv, that you didn't learn that until after the fact.
But I'm also guessing that you gave the Reader a try because you couldn't find anything else that came close to doing what you needed either. It sounds like what you need is nekokami's notional
info pad -- I'd like one myself, actually
-- but, sadly, it just doesn't exist yet.
Many of us here share your frustration on that point, we've just been living with that frustration long enough to recognize that we can't make over the existing device into what it isn't (it just doesn't have the input flexibility needed, frankly). While the Reader will never be the device you're after, a later version very well might. All we can do at this point is wait and see. Oh, yeah: and keep clamoring for the features we need in a Version Next.
