Thread: Which Will Win Out, Sony Reader or Kindle?
View Single Post
Old 08-02-2008, 07:18 PM   #53
DMcCunney
New York Editor
DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
DMcCunney's Avatar
 
Posts: 6,384
Karma: 16540415
Join Date: Aug 2007
Device: PalmTX, Pocket eDGe, Alcatel Fierce 4, RCA Viking Pro 10, Nexus 7
Quote:
Originally Posted by cstross View Post
But the definition of a low end device is a movable feast. Ten years ago, a Palm III with 2Mb of RAM and a 16MHz Dragonball (a 68000 series microprocessor) was more or less state of the art.
Yes. My first PDA was a Palm OS 3.1 device with 8MB of RAM and a 16mhz Dragonball CPU.

Quote:
Today? An iPhone has a 626MHz StrongARM family chip, IIRC, and Intel's pushing the Atom family -- basically a low-power embedded IA32 architecture CPU that scales up to dual cores at 1.2GHz -- at the next generation.
With corresponding power requirements and battery life. I know Intel is pushing hard on the power front, but the days when a device could run a couple of weeks on a pair of AA batteries are long gone, and I don't see current efforts as doing more than slowing the increase in power requirements.

Quote:
ePub has only been out for about 12 months. If it's to be a stable file format, it's going to be around (modulo some tweaking) for more like 10-20 years. (Look at Postscript or PDF or HTML.)

In ten years time, the workload of rendering ePub will look trivial.
I concur. But I'm not concerned with ten years from now. I'm concerned with next year, and the year after. And there will be a lot of legacy devices that don't get replaced because they serve their intended purpose. (Mine can be described that way.)

In ten years, ePub might be the standard ebook format that everything uses. It isn't now, and I don't see that changing near term. But if you treat ePub among other things as a base format which can be converted to what ever is supported on your device, you don't care, as long as the conversion happens.

I have a simple want. I want to download electronic content once, and read it on whatever I happen to have handy. So I want a format that is broadly supported, both on a wide range of devices, and by a wide range of publishers. Right now, I maintain five viewers on my PDA to handle all of the content that resides on it, and I'd like to reduce that to fewer.

Down the road, that format may be ePub. Right now, it isn't, and won't be any time soon.
______
Dennis
DMcCunney is offline   Reply With Quote