[DMcCunney]

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.

You and a lot of other people, I think. Right now were in early adopter kland, and the hardware is more expensive because there isn't that much of it. If volumes increase, prices can drop.

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.

I doubt you see an all-in-one.

The problem with converged devices is that the form factor is always a compromise. We want our smartphones tiny. We want our ebook readers to have relatively large screens. You won't get that in the same package...

I know people have rightly made the point about the limited range of content, but equally the content available as eBooks does seem to be a lot wider than it was even a couple of years ago. More and more computer books are available in pdf (paper computer manuals are now more or less extinct). Lonely Planet are making available more of their travel guides available. I'm sure the same is true of a lot of other areas of publishing - at least where the books are big and bulky, the content is for reference, and needs updating at regular intervals.

There is still a market for paper computer books, and outfits like O'Reilly and Associates do just fine. Where the electronic versions have taken over is documentation included with software, as prices and margins on software make includng pronted documentation uneconomic.

As far as handheld devices are concerned the ePub standard has got to be the key. I think the mobipocket is a great piece of software ( the look up and annotation facilities for example are just really slick) but I very much doubt publishers ae going to want to replicate what has happened with iTunes and the market for legal music downloads (though that said you wonder what would have happened if it hadn't been for the success of iTunes).

Well, some standard has to be the key. I want all concerned to agree on a standard format for ebooks. I want to download content once, and read it on whatever device I have, without worrying about what content is in what format viewed by what software.

I suspect that publishers will start to jump on the bandwagon once there is an easy way to repurpose content as an e-Book that doesn't tie them into one route to the market. Hopefully Amazon will put its weight behind eBooks - eg a big button 'Want it now?' or whatever, as well as promoting the general advantages of eBooks over pBooks for many types of book.

Books are prepared as electronic content for publication, and it's not that big a deal to generate alternate electronic formats for use as ebooks. (Imagesetters expect PDFs as input to generate the files that are used to make plates for printing.)

Publishers will jump on it if/when they perceive a market, and get past the idea that "electronic format"="piracy".
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Dennis