The thing which I'm not seeing addressed is the matter of bandwidth.
A 4-colour glossy magazine of some 10s of pages represents _gigabytes_ of data --- and one can just grab it off a newsstand and flip through it instantly --- I'm currently waiting some 10s of minutes just to copy a couple of gigabytes of graphics from a DVD-R to a server (over 1000BT).
Once upon a time I subscribed to a couple of .pdf magazines at
www.qmags.com and it was always striking how much the resolution of images was reduced and how long it still took to d/l the files.
Now one has things like Olive magazine (a flash based interface) and one has to d/l a page at a time and flipping from one end to the other of the file takes rather a while.
Even if one does lower the resolution to what's possible on a screen, people will still want to be able to zoom in --- so the device has to have a connection to d/l the higher resolution / zoomed image.
When is the next breakthrough in bandwidth going to happen? Until then, what sort of compromises are going to be necessary and how will this affect battery life and interfaces?
William
(who carries a loupe in his laptop bag for examining the details in printed works from time-to-time)