My absolute top-of-the-list showstopper-level requirement is that the screen must be
NO WORSE than the current Vizplex screens. That is, touch layers
above the eInk are a no-no. If you can provide a device with better contrast and/or higher resolution (in terms of pixels per inch) that would be great too. I realize, however, that contrast and resolution are driven more by screen technology than device design, so improvements on this front will typically be industry-wide.
A very close second is
massively improved ergonomics. The REB1100 (now sold as the eBookWise 1100) has yet to be equaled for it's physical ergonomics. If you haven't used one, don't just look at pictures! Spend some company $$ and buy one (they're cheap!) and use it for a few hours. Then force your industrial design team to use it. A few of the important points:
- It fits well in your hand; that odd-looking battery-lump is actually functional.
- The user can choose which page-turn button is forward vs. backward.
- The device can be rotated so that any of its four sides is the top.
- Its large page-turn buttons mean that no matter how you hold it, there's always a button that's super-convenient to press. Even so, their placement means they don't get pushed by accident either.
These features combine to guarantee that the next-page button is
ALWAYS well-placed,
no matter how the user chooses to hold the device! (It's an old-tech device, of course, so by today's standards it's too heavy, too slow, and has a sucky screen. None of which detracts from the points above.) This ergonomics issue is a HUGE BIG DEAL! I'm absolutely boggled that nobody's done better than the REB1100 in all these years. Hit these first two items, and I'll buy one for sure.
Third come a bunch of firmware features you can implement
outside the document reading software (
e.g. no changes needed in the Adobe ePub reading software):
- Support a user-provided document that can refer to another doc (like an html link to a local document), where clicking on the link causes the other document to open in the appropriate eBook display software. A good choice of format for this document would be an opds file (it's an open standard!) This single feature would allow user-defined navigation of the eBooks on the reader. And the Calibre folks (or the Calibre2opds folks) would be THRILLED to provide their users with configurable support for producing custom index files -- especially if the file format you choose is an open standard. If you do this, you could skip the next two...
- Robust organization support for users with LARGE libraries. Sony's collections are nice, and their lists with side-bar alphabet are OK, but they come up short when there are more than a few hundred books on the device.
- Honor the "display-as" (or file-as, or author-sort, or whatever) attribute in eBook meta-data. All of the major ebook formats have metadata fields that distinguish between the visible representation of the author's name and the version to be used for sorting. That is, I want to see the author's name displayed as "John Doe," but have it sorted as "Doe, John" -- exactly as it would be on a library shelf!!!
Fourth come features that require changes to the software for displaying eBooks (such as Adobe's ADE mobile):
- User-selectable fonts. A reasonable selection built-in is a good start. Support for user-downloaded fonts would be even better!
- Good hyphenation support. This makes full-justification look OK, instead of lousy.
- If automatic hyphenation is NOT available, allow the user to TURN OFF full-justification and go with ragged-right instead.
- Let the user turn off the *&^%*&^%C teeny right-margin page numbers in ADE mobile! New versions of ADE already support this, IIRC.
I'll probably think of more right after hitting send.
Xenophon