[ashkulz]

Well,

First, the LCD is going to kill the life of the battery as compared to e-ink.

Second, ebooks are already easy to read - once the proper ebook application is installed - on the PC.

Third, the various SBCs out there are dirt cheap already, even the high-power versions of the ARM and XScale cpus. So coming up with a NEW design using a cheap but under-powered cpu makes no sense.

Well, with a LCD you can still get a life of around 16-18 hours easily -- we get that right now with the 1100/1150 readers. Also, I wasn't suggesting to make a new design -- just use the cheapest design that is available right now.

Fourth, and here's the killer, pre-formatting every 'page' to an 800x600 monochrome bitmap wastes space.

I agree that it would be a waste of space, but that makes the device simple in the extreme -- a bit like the digital photo frames which you can get very cheaply. Also, storage is not that much of an issue -- even with this "waste", the size of a typical book would not be more than 4-5MB.

Further, I submit to you that it's not the cost of the ebook reader which is causing the problems. No, it's the insistence by so many publishers that each ebook be locked up with DRM to 'protect' each copy from 'pirates' and 'thieves'. You really need to read Eric Flint's essays on DRM to more fully understand this.

I'd tend to disagree on that. It's a chicken and egg situation: you need the hardware out there before publishers will take it seriously, and people won't buy the hardware unless the content is out there. And no one (except for dedicated bibliophiles) will spend too much on a device which may not work or be supported in a few years. And yes, I have read Eric Flint's essays.

And if I had my druthers, I'd druther make a $10 flexible e-ink-based ebook which holds one and only one story because the $50 ebook reader is too expensive - for the 'feature set' which could be installed at that price. A $50 ebook reader would have no more features than the $10 flexible ebook I mentioned first but would cost five times as much. On the other hand, the $300-$450 ebook readers that are out there have far more features I, as a reader, want and can be used without difficulty to read a wide range of ebook formats - as well as have their software expanded and upgraded when improvements come along. Also, I'll be far more willing to take care of a $300, full-featured device than I would a $50 one because I would perceive it to have more 'value'.

I agree with you that a $10 book reader would be even more better, but it simply isn't economical at the moment. I came up with the $50 figure out of thin air, so don't take it as gospel

Also, this "format" neatly sidesteps all format wars: you can convert everything to a raster image, so there would be no problems of not being able to read this or that format on the device. I've been reading PDFs on my 1100 lately, and I can't distinguish between rendering done by the ebook with the page image generated on the PC. So essentially you can offload all the processing tasks to the PC, leaving the device to be dumb. It's a perfect example of the "worse is better" principle. The idea of behind the Info Pad is similar to that -- make everything as simple as it can be.