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Originally Posted by Ravenflight
I don't get this assertion that reading is a 'niche' activity. Fact is that listening to mp3's used to be a niche activity till someone (Apple) figured out that it's not about just the device it's the interface and the user experience. There were plenty of mp3 players before the iPod- but you never saw wide adoption till the iPod came out.
Personally I don't know anyone who doesn't read books. My wife reads books, my coworkers read books, and all three of my kids read books. There are more bookstores where I live than music stores, and every Wal Mart and grocery store I shop at carries at least a few hardcover and paperbacks. I can find the latest Harry Potter novel easier than I can find the latest Carrie Underwood CD or the movie 300 on DVD. This would tend to indicate (to me anyway) that purchasing books is at least as popular an activity as purchasing movies or CD's. So how is this a "niche" activity? The largest online retailer in the world is Amazon.com, and they started as a online bookseller- and I believe that is still their core business, despite branching out to sell everything else under the sun.
Personally I see no reason why a beautifully designed reader, with an elegant UI coupled with a seamless cross platform store (ala iTunes) wouldn't do as well as the iPod. Unfortunately nobody out there has both the resources and the vision to have put it together. Yet.
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As has been reported recently, few Americans are reading books and 1 in 4 confesses to not having read a book in the last year.
http://imparo.wordpress.com/2007/08/...reading-books/ discusses the CNN article at
http://www.cnn.com/2007/LIVING/wayof....ap/index.html
I do see an awful lot of people on my daily train just gazing out of the window or listening to their ipod. Sure, there's plenty of people reading books, but there's more who are not. I don't think that eReaders will EVER be as ubiquitous as ipods, but done right, at the right price, I do believe they could become very popular. I think an 8 inch screen would be about the optimum size.
I think our biggest fight is always going to be against the negative, ignorant comments about the latest ebook reader based on "black and white screen", "no note taking capability", "can't display PDF", "no back light" etc. I believe most of these comments come from people who DON'T READ BOOKS anyway and can be comfortably discounted.
How about we start a wiki article with the pros and cons of e-books versus p-books? Something we can refer to quickly when the latest engadget review appears and the flood of usual negative comments appears.
Me? I AM looking forward to getting an e-book reader, and my top 3 reasons are...
1) Sick of lugging heavy hardback books around in my backpack.
2) No space for any more bookshelves. There's only a very few authors I "collect" and keep anyway.
3) Many free classics I want to read for the first time, and many I want to re-read.
Personally, I've NEVER written notes on a book that I've read for pleasure. Textbooks at school sure, but in the last 15 years, NEVER. I open a book, 99% of the time black and white, and I read it cover to cover. I never read in the dark as I always found booklights uncomfortable. And I hate reading off of LCD backlit screens as that's what I do all day as a programmer.
The new Cybook can't come soon enough for me, and I really hope it gets some positive reviews. If it does, I'll be all over it....
P.S. For those clamouring for Letter size PDF on a 6 inch screen, take them to a photocopier and ask them to copy and reduce it to the 6 inch size. Then ask them, "What did you expect?". The only way that letter size PDF will ever become vaguely useful on an e-reader is when they have a clam-shell design with two 8 inch screens next to each other.