Quote:
Originally Posted by dmaul1114
Agree 100%.
These discussions tend to go in circles as most here are just interested in e-readers for leisure.
Us academics etc. need a professional device with a larger screen, ability to annotate with stylus, flip pages and switch documents quickly etc. and size, portability, battery life etc. are less crucial.
|
I believe that there is a great deal more overlap than some people (and apparently most reader producers) realize. As a leisure reader of novels, I often find myself confronted with situation where a "find" function would be helpful ("who the hell was that character again? I know he was introduced back in Chapter 3"). Since I often read multi-novel series, it would be nice to switch back easily and review a scene, too. Dictionary wouldn't be bad--I thought I knew about every obscure horse term it was possible to know but was recently thrown by "destrier". As a leisure reader of magazines and cookbooks, it would be nice to bookmark and tag a recipe I would like to try. And then when I tried it, to jot down a note or two ("subbed whole wheat flour, worked great!"). Lots of knitting and crochet patterns are electronic files (often PDF, some free, some pay), and Interweave Press is offering more and more e-books. And we fibery types are always changing something that we need to track (needle, yarn, gauge), and many of us work from charts that need to display properly. Don't think e-savvy knitters are much of a force? Right now there are over 2000 people active on Ravelry. That's right this second, people actually logged in (I note there are only about 100 here at the moment, and 400 some guests)--there are almost half a million registered users.
Even things like crosswords. By definition you have to "annotate" a crossword, and there's plenty out there who would love to be able to easily flip back and forth from the puzzle to, ahem, an assistance document of some form (i.e. a crossword solver's dictionary).
Lots of people would like to ditch the reading glasses, too, and if you zoom up the text enough on the small devices, you get about a sentence per page, which is annoying, too. On a larger form factor device, somebody like my FIL would be able to read much more comfortably. And jot down notes in the margins of the Economist, as is his wont.
Everything that is desirable in an "academic/business" reader has a place for many, many leisure users, too. To focus the market in two narrow divisions--those who would otherwise read only paperback novels and thus require the same degree of portability, and those who read documents for professional/academic purposes (and with business accounts to pay for the markup on things marketed in that way) is shortsighted.