Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
Must be nice to have enough time to polish off an entire novel in a sitting! I guess that's why I'm not that drawn to the long battery life of a dedicated device: My reading time rarely extends past an hour at a time...
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It's rarely one sitting. But ten minutes before leaving for work, half-hour on transit to work, half-hour at lunchtime, half-hour on transit going home, and maybe an hour after dinner adds up. I don't want any of those interrupted by the need to reacharge. If I haven't finished my book by the time my eyes are too tired to read, I don't want to drag myself out of bed & find the charger.
I was relatively content reading on a Clié, and would've continued indefinitely if I hadn't run into other problems. (One screen died; one wouldn't hold more than 5 minutes of battery charge.) But even then, I was annoyed at running out of battery mid-book, and had to plan my reading around access to the charger. And I spent a lot of time reading with the backlight off, at odd angles in order to catch the ambient light, to make the battery last longer.
I might be willing to deal with a dedicated ebook reader that didn't have the longer battery life--but it'd have to have some *excellent* other features to make up for it, and I don't mean "web access." Good folder support, perhaps. Reflow & resize several doc types, including PDF. Annotations & bookmarks. Scroll-based rather than page-based text. Support for all major ebook formats: lit, prc, epub, ereader, fb2. Support for non-ebook formats like html, rtf and txt.
Nobody's working on The Great Ebook Reader with those features; they're working on 2005's PDA ebook capabilities, plus as many iPhone apps as they can make the device capable of supporting.