Quote:
Originally Posted by DawnFalcon
If I'm to use it for ebook reading, then the battery life is non-negociable. Otherwise I'll need to carry books with me anyway, given how long I'm away from charge points, and hence I'll be purchasing paper and not ebooks.
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Agreed.
For me, an ebook reader needs to have, as a bare minimum, enough battery life to read an entire long novel start to finish. I'd say "more than one," but ability to read a Baen-length novel (100-130k words) covers 2 and sometimes 3 short novels, like Harlequin romances, which are often barely 50k words. (I prefer to measure books by word count; I know how long it takes me to read 50k words, much more than I know how long it takes to read "200 pages," which could be anywhere from 30k to 125k words, depending on layout.)
I suppose I'd consider minimum battery life for a dedicated ebook reader to be 200-250k words between recharges. If it's less than that, there's too much chance of running out of charge mid-book, because I don't think it's reasonable to have to start each book on a fresh, full battery charge.
Even though I'm rarely away from a charger for more than a few hours, I don't want to have to stop my evening reading to put the book on a charger.
AFTER battery life has been established, I'm willing to discuss the niftiness of non-book functions. Sure, I'd like sudoku and and an address book in my reader. And email would be cool, too. Just not if it means I lose the ability to finish a book without interruptions.