[LDBoblo]

Originally Posted by troymc

I'm not sure if you even meant that post as a rational statement, but here goes anyways...

I know a half-dozen people who own Sony 505s, and not one of them uses any of the additional features (eg mp3 player, picture viewer, games.) They bought them to read ebooks. Dedicated ebook readers are only "crippled" from your point of view.

No, they're pretty crippled. They are advertised and marketed as reading devices, and the awful extra features are not only far inferior to the primitive reading function, but are also not actively marketed and are generally disregarded. If the devices were at all competent at handling more diverse media, they would be marketed accordingly.

The current ereader market shows you are badly mistaken. The reason ereaders like the Sony, Kindle & Nook are so successfully is because they work well as ebook readers - even with their current faults.

I'm sorry but you are not contradicting me. I said they are crippled devices. I in no way said they were unsuccessful in the marketplace.

And are you attempting to imply that "displaying badly typeset text" would somehow be better on the iPad with it's color LCD + bells & whistles?

No. Not unless there were good software for it. That's why I mentioned that.

The characterisation of the text is more a quality of the document not the reader - although some readers do have issues with some parts of existing standards. (eg. older ADE-based ereaders can't handle justification, iPad can't handle embedded fonts, etc.)

There are a rare few that have choppy support for some elements like hyphenation (I think Stanza had some support, and FBReader supports it...), kerning, and other pleasantries, but it's pretty hilarious what the general state of the art is at the moment, and even more hilarious what people are willing to accept (or in the case of MR members, sometimes prefer).

Again, your "guess", your "idea". I know a couple of people who actually have iPads - not one of them bought it for the ereader capability. In fact, only one actually has any books on his.

Apologies for the confusion; I was trying to be slightly less pompous by using language that admitted assumption. I know a couple iPad owners myself (wow, small world huh), and am happy to stick with my assumption based on a limited sample size of acquaintances, an apparently active press interest in the subject, and my own consideration of it for precisely that usage scenario.

If, in your opinion, there aren't even any "decent ebook reading programs" for the iPad, then why would people "buy iPads primarily for reading"? And how could you possible see it as an non-crippled ebook reader?

I do see it as another mostly crippled reader, but my knowledge of software for it ceased a few weeks or a month after its release, and I'm willing to admit there may be far superior ebook reading platforms than iBooks and Kindle for it. People are happy buying the Kindle, Nook, and many other crippled readers, so naturally such an outrageous phenomenon is possible.

Your points of view are inconsistent and do not seem to match reality.

Interesting reality.