Quote:
Originally Posted by Jack Tingle
There seem to be two schools (or maybe 2.5) here.
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One says, "Focus like a laser on your principal task, reading books."
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The second school wants to push the large screen ereader towards convergence.
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Jack has it right. Someone else used the example of Swiss Army Knives vs. Specialized cooking knives....There is a legitimate need and market for both, and some people will only need one of the alternatives.
E-readers are primitive enough now, especially due to (in the view of most of us) needing to use rather clunky E-ink to be readable for long periods, that I suspect specialized readers will be preferred by most book consumers for the near future, but in the distant future (for consumer electronic devices that means five to ten years) I'm not so sure that will be true.
Cell phones and Personal Digital Assistants (such as the old Palm Pilot) have converged already. It is popular now to have separate devices for many purposes:
playing games (Play Station Portable or Nintendo DS for example),
viewing or listening to media (iPod Touch or Creative Zen),
smart phone that itself is a convergence of two devices,
GPS (which is converging with smart phones),
low end digital cameras (which have converged with cell phones) and
Laptop computers.
My suspicion is that over the next few years we will see convergence of many of these things, the netbook may be the vanguard of that movement. But even if we do, specialized devices will always be better for their purpose, and some people will have their entire needs met by one or two specialized devices, especially the basic cell phone that just does phone calls and texting. The problem of screen size will always be a hurdle for convergence e-readers to overcome, though.