Quote:
Originally Posted by polly
What really baffles me is that none of the reviewers are at all curious about reader software - how it organizes books, if it uses metadata or not, how hard or easy it is to side load and find books on the device. They rave about 3G and assume that people who use ereaders are too stupid to load content from a computer. Sigh... Rant over.  |
Hi Polly. I share your rant. I think the reviewers are looking for what they would want in a reader and it's probably something that will distribute newspapers and magazines directly to their customers; Wifi is great if that’s what you need. I can only guess why but they don’t seem to realize that they have the wrong paradigm. The important thing about publishing is not that it uses ‘ink on paper’; the importance of publishing is the content.
I have a beautiful book with great photos of the moon and planets, galaxies, stars and nebula. It’s full of beautiful, full color images on big 14.25 by 17.25 inch glossy paper. I compared it with a paperback copy of The Tale of Two Cities, which was published on 4.25 by 6.5 inch pages with a reading area of just 3.25 by 5 inches. Then I measured the Pocket Pro and found a reading screen size of 3 by 4 inches. Obviously if you tried to publish Cosmos on a Pocket Pro no one could read it.
Books, newspapers and magazines are published in all sorts of ways based on how best to present the content and for some content Wifi is best but it’s not best for all. Criticizing any 5-inch book reader for not having Wifi is like criticizing a submarine for riding low in the water. If your only paradigm for warships is the battleship, then submarines can’t possibly rise to your standard. (That wasn’t meant as a pun but I’m going to leave it.)
I bought a single copy of a newspaper called "The New York Observer" to try it out. It seemed to me that while it worked, it felt tight on the Pocket Pro. So I got a single copy of the "Washington Times," a regular sized newspaper. They did a fair job formatting it (after I resized the font) and the banner looked great, but reading it compared poorly to reading a book, either fiction or nonfiction.
This is a new technology and I expect it will take awhile for the reviewers to catch on and figure out how to evaluate book readers. In the meantime, let’s keep ranting. It can’t hurt.