Quote:
Originally Posted by charleski
This is why trials of the Kindle in an academic environment have failed so badly. [...]
The only issues are:
1) This takes power and moves you away from the ultra-light fiction-reader model.
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Actually now that I think about it some more I see that the software is key, it should support that academic professional focus right across the process. It should be able to cope with various hardware and systems, it makes me realise that making the 'ereader' as a piece of hardware misses the main game. The academic ereader would have to be able to work across a number and variety of screens in different situations.
But a big but light colour e-ink coffee table ereader does have it's attractions. But I'll take a ultra-light pocket reader too. And a projector. And I'll be looking across all of them at the same time. Depending.
An academic ereader is a techno-nugget that can link those screens.
That's what the iPod really did, it wasn't just an mp3 player, because it connected. iPod/itunes was a proprietary ecosystem that grafted itself onto the filesharing ecosystem.
The iPad is an attempt to do that with media generally, on the back of the ipod experience and the iphone ecosystem.
It's got the commercial inertia to play hard but it's not what I want in supporting the read and write academic professional world.
Pooh for kids looks great though but it mostly reminds me of hypercard and the multimedia revolution back just before the web really took off.