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Originally Posted by andym
...If the reader sold at $100 and read all of the available formats (or at least the basics - pdf, mobipocket, html, text, rtf, Word) and has some pda functionality - well I might be interested.
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If it could handle those formats and was a supported device (I'm also in the UK) I'd happily pay full price for it, even unseen!
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I don't know whether the future is a super-gizmo that doubles as a phone, MP3 player, video player, GPS and eReader, or separate devices for all or some of these functions - probably a combination of the two.
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I think convergence is inevitable (if the functions can be built-in cheaply enough - try buying a digital watch
without a stopwatch, countdown timer, split lap timer, alarm etc.. etc..) though personally I'd want a book reader principally to be
just that - the other things may be handy to have available, but they wouldn't be the prime reason to purchase; mind you, I bought my mobile phone specifically because it has a decent camera, and I dump my address book contents into my iPod when I go on holiday, so I'm not totally immune to the concept!
Then again, we're all different...
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I think the mobipocket is a great piece of software ( the look up and annotation facilities for example are just really slick)...
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Never knew they existed, and I've no idea what I'd do with them, personally!
Perhaps what we'll see is an inevitable convergence of the functions of the reader devices, but a divergence of the markets for eBooks; clearly the needs of the needs and requirements of the 'current fiction' reader (that's a person, not a device) are different from that of the 'technical manual' readers, who are different again from the 'educational' reader, the 'medical' reader etc.. etc..
Interesting times ahead.
Cheers, Pete.