Quote:
Originally Posted by darknessangel
I don't need fingersmudge (oops, sorry, touchscreen) or dictionary or wifi or 3GS or taking notes... I just want to read the damn book!
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I would like to have "
I just want to read the damn book!" tattooed on the insides of the eyelids of all of the marketroids who are pushing to add more and more misfeatures to ebook readers. By the time they're done "improving" our readers, the things will walk the dog, wash the car, feed the chickens, and do everything else
but display ebooks in the best way possible. There's a reason we don't set the dinner table with Swiss Army knives.
I put a lot of the blame, just as I have for years with creeping featurism in software, on reviewers. Counting features is the easy way out for a reviewer, so most of them do it; after a while, many of them rely on it. Whether those features are necessary, useful, or even functional enters into it less and less with every review. Users, especially novice users, read those reviews by The Experts (they have to be experts, right, since they're paid to write reviews?) and learn from them that counting features is a valid way to evaluate software -- or ebook readers. It brings to mind the "Battle of the Buttons" between rival kitchen blender manufacturers in the 1960s, as described in Donald Norman's
The Design of Everyday Things (a book I
highly recommend you read, even if you have no interest in design; all else aside, the writing is awesome): "To appear superior to their predecessors, new blenders had more and more speed settings added, until, by 1968, a machine with 15 buttons appeared." I actually own a blender from that era, with a minimalist (for its time) 8 buttons; I use three: the slowest, the fastest, and one in the middle. Take a look at the current version of any word processor and you'll see what I mean. How many of the features cluttering up the menus do you use? Yeah, neither does anyone else.
I think it's worst in MS-Word, and for a reason: Microsoft's biggest rival is ... Microsoft. Specifically, the products they sold last year, and the year before, and so on back. The other thing Microsoft has is a big staff of developers who need to be kept employed. If Microsoft doesn't pay them, someone else will, and then Microsoft might have just trained its own competition.
To keep those developers employed, Microsoft has to sell software; to sell software, Microsoft has to convince people who already have a program they're happy with that they need to throw it out and buy new. To do that, they have to encourage dissatisfaction with their own products, but not in such a way as to make people dissatisfied with their brand, too. Promoting their newer products as faster, for instance, or with fewer bugs, could be a very bad thing. If you say your competitor's product is slow and buggy, that tarnishes the competitor's reputation ... and Microsoft doesn't dare do that, because their competitor is themselves. But "new features" is a safe sort of "better"; since they're new, the features weren't technically possible in the previous version, so there's nothing bad about Microsoft-last-year not including them. And you
need those new features, just ask any reviewer.
In the case of ebook readers, the reviewers (trained well by years of reading and writing software reviews) count features. This one has a dictionary, that one doesn't. This one has a gimmicky LCD strip, that one has a keyboard. The way to get a good review isn't to make a totally awesome device, but to make an adequate one with a couple of extra blades in the Swiss Army knife. By the way, no disparagement of Swiss Army knives is meant; I own four, including the one with a USB drive in it.
Sadly, I don't think that's ever going to change. Feature-counting reviews and feature-stuffing manufacturers are probably with us for good, along with the exhortations to replace perfectly good things (cars being a big one) with the newest model just because it's newer, not because it does anything we need, and the advertising arms race. But we as individuals can opt out. We can look at features through the mindset of "do I need this?" rather than "could I ever possibly utilize this?" as the feature-stuffers want us to do. We can ask ourselves whether we really need to replace something that's still doing its job. And we can look past feature-counting in reviews and decide which one is better, rather than which one can tick more boxes on a list. You can save a ton of money that way ... not to mention avoiding having to learn the quirks of a different car -- or ebook reader -- every couple of years.
By the way, *cough* "borrowing" *cough* ebooks won't get you a lot of points around here. Too many of us are authors, friends of authors, admirers of authors, wanna-be authors (that would be me), or just plain honorable people. There are plenty of sources of affordable and legitimately free ebooks; use 'em.