PCs are best for e-reading, Microsoft's Ballmer says

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

Dennis, it's a fair point. In the larger sense, the world doesn't need UMPCs. (No one needed the iPhone, either.) But it is a new form factor... and I'm sure there are those out there who don't need a desk-bound computer, think cellphones are too small and laptops are too big for their needs... yet a UMPC would fit their needs perfectly. That alone makes the device worthwhile, for somebody.

I suspect I wasn't clear enough.

The original UMPCs had underwhelming sales, precisely because they didn't have a compelling use to justify buying one. ("I already have a desktop, a laptop, and a smartphone. Why do I need a UMPC?")

The ASUS eee pretty much created the netbook market, that everyone is now jumping into with both feet. While the form factor is roughly equivalent, the eee had two advantages over the original UMPCs:

1) It had a compelling use case. It was a portable Internet device.

2) It was a lot cheaper than the earlier UMPCs.

The combination of form-factor, use, and price was the win.

It's just another choice for the consumer, and I'm always for more choices, more ways to personalize the things you do. If a PC works for your e-book reading, by all means, go for it. If you like to read on a Blackberry, use that instead. And if you really want to read on your Gameboy... more power to you.

Oh, I quite agree. But I'm thinking a bit more from the perspective of the vendor here: I stay in business by offering products and services that fulfill needs and that people willingly buy. If I plan to offer a new product/service, it behooves me to make sure it fills a need beyond my need to generate more revenue and profits. It needs to fill a need for my customers.

I don't begrudge any company in trying to sell a product. I do rail against selling products under false pretenses, about as much as I hate to see consumers respond to condescending and psychologically-loaded ads. (As you might guess, advertising, and consumer response to ads, have made me livid on occasion...)

Nor do I. What I was cynical about was an attempt to create and sell products that seemed to be rooted in "How can we generate more revenue and profit, and keep our growth, and therefore our stock price, up?" It's an understandable goal, but revenue comes from outside the enterprise. You get it as a consequence of filling a customer need. If you start with "What needs do my customers have that aren't being filled and I can address?", you are more likely to make the revenue and profits you desire.

I also rail against being forced to buy a product, or being denied available choices. Fortunately, when it comes to e-book reading hardware, we have lots of choices, many configurations offered by multiple brands, and that's good. If people's choices are larger, they are more likely to find the most comfortable way of doing whatever they want to do... like reading e-books... and therefore, will probably do it more. If the UMPC does that for someone, it is to be lauded.

Agreed again. The UMPC might well be a good choice as an ebook reader, since the form factor might be suitable for the user, and it meets the criteria of "able to do other things besides display ebooks" (which is my main reason for not buying a dedicated reader: I need a multi-function device.)

But reading ebooks will be simply one thing a UMPC will do. I doubt it will be the reason someone buys a UMPC in the first place.

And after all, it's not like anyone is forcing you to buy one...

No, and I didn't buy one.
______
Dennis

[DawnFalcon]

Originally Posted by Phogg

Cost me $550 on clearance. gets two hours now because the battery is getting old.

Right. That's an order of magnitude short of the very, very low end I'd consider acceptable for an e-reader I'd buy.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

Right. That's an order of magnitude short of the very, very low end I'd consider acceptable for an e-reader I'd buy.

That assumes a dedicated ebook reading device?

What's acceptable for you in a multi-function device that displays ebooks as one of the things it can do for you?
______
Dennis

[DawnFalcon]

If I'm to use it for ebook reading, then the battery life is non-negociable. Otherwise I'll need to carry books with me anyway, given how long I'm away from charge points, and hence I'll be purchasing paper and not ebooks.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

If I'm to use it for ebook reading, then the battery life is non-negociable. Otherwise I'll need to carry books with me anyway, given how long I'm away from charge points, and hence I'll be purchasing paper and not ebooks.

Agreed.

For me, an ebook reader needs to have, as a bare minimum, enough battery life to read an entire long novel start to finish. I'd say "more than one," but ability to read a Baen-length novel (100-130k words) covers 2 and sometimes 3 short novels, like Harlequin romances, which are often barely 50k words. (I prefer to measure books by word count; I know how long it takes me to read 50k words, much more than I know how long it takes to read "200 pages," which could be anywhere from 30k to 125k words, depending on layout.)

I suppose I'd consider minimum battery life for a dedicated ebook reader to be 200-250k words between recharges. If it's less than that, there's too much chance of running out of charge mid-book, because I don't think it's reasonable to have to start each book on a fresh, full battery charge.

Even though I'm rarely away from a charger for more than a few hours, I don't want to have to stop my evening reading to put the book on a charger.

AFTER battery life has been established, I'm willing to discuss the niftiness of non-book functions. Sure, I'd like sudoku and and an address book in my reader. And email would be cool, too. Just not if it means I lose the ability to finish a book without interruptions.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

For me, an ebook reader needs to have, as a bare minimum, enough battery life to read an entire long novel start to finish.

Must be nice to have enough time to polish off an entire novel in a sitting! I guess that's why I'm not that drawn to the long battery life of a dedicated device: My reading time rarely extends past an hour at a time...

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

Must be nice to have enough time to polish off an entire novel in a sitting! I guess that's why I'm not that drawn to the long battery life of a dedicated device: My reading time rarely extends past an hour at a time...

It doesn't matter if you read it in one uninterrupted sitting, or in several segments. The question is whether your battery will last long enough to let you finish the book before you need to recharge. You may be somewhere you can't plug in and top off.
______
Dennis

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

It doesn't matter if you read it in one uninterrupted sitting, or in several segments. The question is whether your battery will last long enough to let you finish the book before you need to recharge. You may be somewhere you can't plug in and top off.

All I can say is: I have yet to visit such a place...

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

All I can say is: I have yet to visit such a place...

You've never gone camping in places where you carry backpacks, pitch tents and build fires? The local trees normally don't contain wall warts...
______
Dennis

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

Must be nice to have enough time to polish off an entire novel in a sitting! I guess that's why I'm not that drawn to the long battery life of a dedicated device: My reading time rarely extends past an hour at a time...

It's rarely one sitting. But ten minutes before leaving for work, half-hour on transit to work, half-hour at lunchtime, half-hour on transit going home, and maybe an hour after dinner adds up. I don't want any of those interrupted by the need to reacharge. If I haven't finished my book by the time my eyes are too tired to read, I don't want to drag myself out of bed & find the charger.

I was relatively content reading on a Clié, and would've continued indefinitely if I hadn't run into other problems. (One screen died; one wouldn't hold more than 5 minutes of battery charge.) But even then, I was annoyed at running out of battery mid-book, and had to plan my reading around access to the charger. And I spent a lot of time reading with the backlight off, at odd angles in order to catch the ambient light, to make the battery last longer.

I might be willing to deal with a dedicated ebook reader that didn't have the longer battery life--but it'd have to have some *excellent* other features to make up for it, and I don't mean "web access." Good folder support, perhaps. Reflow & resize several doc types, including PDF. Annotations & bookmarks. Scroll-based rather than page-based text. Support for all major ebook formats: lit, prc, epub, ereader, fb2. Support for non-ebook formats like html, rtf and txt.

Nobody's working on The Great Ebook Reader with those features; they're working on 2005's PDA ebook capabilities, plus as many iPhone apps as they can make the device capable of supporting.

[macminer]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

You've never gone camping in places where you carry backpacks, pitch tents and build fires? The local trees normally don't contain wall warts...
______
Dennis

Well, you could always try a Freeloader:
www.solartechnology.co.uk/

Actually, there's a Freeloader solar panel hidden somewhere in my avatar; and that's because I own one and occasionally use it when I only have access to trees without wall warts
Yet, the power that it produces would not be enough to charge a netbook or UMPC while it is enough to bring back to life a PDA, mobile phone or dedicated e-reader (to be precise, it usually can charge such devices to 80-90% of their total capacity if the day is sunny).

[LazyScot]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

All I can say is: I have yet to visit such a place...

Travelling often leads to long(ish) reading periods without easy recharging opportunities. And when I arrive at the destination a mixture of changes in plug shapes (and very limited plugs in some hotel rooms) can leave you with very limited recharging opportunities.

I'm also forgetful, which means that the device doesn't always get plugged in when it can be. Which is why I value a device that is frugal and needs to eat only infrequently.

[fugazied]

Ballmer is more often wrong than he is right. Not an innovator, not a good business leader, just a monkey in a suit.

Ballmer on the iPhone: "The iPhone is the most expensive phone in the world" while noting that Microsoft sells "millions and millions and millions of phones a year" while "Apple sells zero."

"I'd prefer to have our software in 60 percent or 70 percent or 80 percent of [mobile phones], than I would to have 2 percent or 3 percent, which is what Apple might get," he said. And just this past September, the Microsoft headman predicted that the iPhone’s tight integration with all things Apple would cause it to "lose out" in the long run.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5oGaZIKYvo

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

You've never gone camping in places where you carry backpacks, pitch tents and build fires? The local trees normally don't contain wall warts...

Ever hear of A)spare batteries or B)solar chargers?

That's why I say I've never been to a place where I couldn't charge up...

Besides, when I do camp out, I don't spend most of my time reading... I'm usually hiking, biking, swimming, grilling and wooing my honey under the stars. I squeeze in the reading around all of that.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

It's rarely one sitting. But ten minutes before leaving for work, half-hour on transit to work, half-hour at lunchtime, half-hour on transit going home, and maybe an hour after dinner adds up.

My iPaq can do that 2-3 days in a row, no problem. I'm not bragging... just saying, let's keep the battery life thing in perspective.

What's really important is whether your device suits your needs. If you really manage to get in 3-4 hours reading a day, make sure you get a device (or set of devices) that will accommodate that. If you only manage an hour a day, you'll probably have a larger range of choices that will work for you.