[volwrath]

Originally Posted by ashkulz

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.

I disagree most ebooks text only are from 500k-1.5 MB. You convert that to an image format, you are going to have ebooks from 50MB-1GB. Do the math, if one assumes that each image file is a measly 67k, and most ebooks have 1000 electronic pages, thats already 67megs. And I think I am being light on each image file.

Originally Posted by ashkulz

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.

I think what you need is an ebook reader in the $150 range. Many people would pay that.

Originally Posted by ashkulz

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.

I just dont see what converting ebooks to raster gets you except bigger files, and less compatibility. DRM is the problem here, as well as expensive hardware. My answer get the eReader II down to $150, and more widescale adoption will occur. Much like mp3 players, until the price of the hardware came down, there is not alot of widescale adoption. Now everyone has an mp3 player.

Also what happens when I try to read the 800x600 ebook on my 640x480 device? It resizes the image down? Now the text is unreadable. What if I try to read it on my 1024x768 device? Now the text is blocky.