Quote:
Originally Posted by mike b
... if you're doing research or office work. Most of the academic papers out there are in pdf, latex, or Word. More and more business documents are in pdf. If there were an ereader that could read tex or Word documents then no worries (is there one?). But until there is, I can't see much usefulness for a reader without pdf.
It seems to me that to get the ebook/ereader market really going, you _need_ to cater to the needs of the average business/lab/office worker in their day-to-day job. Either that or drop the ereader prices to a par with other toys like Nintendo DS', etc.
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The main problem right now, at least with the Sony Reader, is that it lacks native A4/Letter Size PDF support. When these documents are rescaled, the font rendering doesn't preserve the document's native weight, and the results are generally too pale to be usable. Unofficial tools like Alex's wonderful RasterFarian correct this, but the translation should happen natively.
By the way, does the same problem occur with the Iliad? At 1024 x 768, I would think that rescaling would cease to be an issue.
Anyway, I was impressed by the Cybook in the video, especially by the fast refresh. I haven't been bothered by the page turning on the Sony, but now I see how much room for improvement there is.
I'll probably get one of these. My hope for the Sony was to be able to read online content offline more than to read books. I have some HTML support solutions in place, but they're all more trouble than they're worth compared to native rendering. And, like everyone else has noted, Mobipocket seems to have more of a future than BBeB.