[frabjous]

Originally Posted by scottjl

Apple does not market the iPad as an ebook reader, it is a media device that also does ebooks.

I didn't say they only market it as an ebook reader, but they definitely do market it as, among other things, an ebook reader. If not, then why is iBooks featured, e.g.,:
http://www.apple.com/ipad/features/

I can read any of my 500+ stored eBooks with little difficulty, so I'd say it's got decent support out of the box.

Decent support of those 500 ebooks. Geez. It's clear that it will support certain kinds of books and not others.

So customers shouldn't have to buy other applications? Then why have the App store?

They shouldn't have to buy applications for doing things that Apple advertises that it can do natively.

Should I expect Apple to cater to everyones whims and include every application I can think of bundled into the OS? Oh wait, Microsoft did that and got investigated for being a monopoly. My Mac didn't come with a word processor or spreadsheet, I really should go back and complain to Jobs about that.

I never said anything like that.

Wait, so you expect Apple to include software that does everything you want, perfectly, but no one else has to meet that obligation?

People have to meet the obligations that they advertise that they meet yes. People do not have to meet obligations that they do not advertise.

You excuse Microsoft because you say they are incompetent, maybe they are,

I wasn't excusing microsoft. Their incompetence is inexcusable. I was claiming it wasn't relevant to this thread, which is, after all, only a comparison between the ipad and the Sony reader.

As for Android, so you expect mom to go and code up her own open source application because Google didn't include it? As I said, funny how you have different standards for different companies.

I don't expect Granny to do it. I expect her to be able to do it if she had the expertise. Perhaps the Woz was right in saying that this is a device for grannies and children. It is not a device for the intelligent user.

The iPad is only available in the US at this time. The US has one official language, English. English has one character set. Apple met their obligations to include this character set in the US available iPad.

Abject silliness. How dare someone in the US want to be exposed to another language? Next thing we know, people might actually try to think for themselves! Apple used to be a company interested in education. How can we use tools to educate people about the world when it won't even display other language? Or technical mathematical formalism?

Did you really expect Apple to include a rosetta stone in the box? Be happy with the Apple stickers.

No. Please read my posts. In comparison to the Sony, the ipad is better in terms of what characters it supports natively. Sony is terrible. But at least Sony gave people a way around it: if you want a different character, embed that font. Apple, as is their modus operandi, takes away that ability, and in general takes away your choice as a user.

Remember, Jobs said people don't read anymore. They're marketing it as a media tablet, e-books is just one part of that, and one they aren't focusing a lot of marketing on.

They are definitely pitching it as something for students, and students would be using it for reading. But really, if you're coming into a thread comparing the iPad to the Sony Reader, reading should be the focus of the comparison. If the issue is which is better for watching movies on, you won't hear any disagreement.

For most people out there, I strongly suspect the iPad is all the eBook reader they will need.

But there is a large segment of the population--the segment perhaps which is both most technologically savvy, and stands to be one of Apple's largest client bases, which is left out. I mean, a device like this could be great for higher-ed. But not if it's so limited in such capacities.

Agree 100%. For most people text is text. But this is an e-book site so you have to deal with the die hard hobbyists who are much pickier.

I'm not "hobbyist". I'm a college professor. I don't know... I have this crazy idea that if I post something to my course website or distribute an ebook to my students that uses mathematical symbols or a characters from foreign languages, and am willing to actually provide the fonts necessary for displaying these things (not expecting the device to have them natively), then, maybe, just maybe, a device marketed to students should be able to display it. Or... (even!) failing that... if I want to write the software that will display it myself, I should be able to provide it to my students freely, both on my end and on theirs.

Not being an avid reader, I'd be better off (and get annoyed less often) than at this site which is for avid readers.

Yes, educated people are annoying like that.

I did, by the way, check out one at the store a couple hours ago. The SVG support seems OK. It has the same flaw that both Safari-Desktop and Google Chrome has that the background of the SVG will appear white even when it's set to transparent and the page background is non-white, but that's a fairly minor problem compared to the usual poor support for SVG in other contexts.