Poll: Which ePaper device will you get?

[TaKir]

Kosst Amojan
would u wash your mouth, mister "graduated from college last spring", pls!

[drachasor]

Originally Posted by Kosst Amojan

3. Not made by damn dirty commies, I don't buy chinese products, period. I don't care how much they pretend to be capitalists, any success on their part still supports their government.

There are pretty good reasons to believe that the more China becomes part of the global economy in terms of trade, capital flow, etc, the greater effect more liberal* ideas will have on their country. Hence you are supporting the current administration's existence more by not buying anything made in China.

Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that China is a great place at the moment or anything like that. It has a long way to go, but it will only be able to get there one step at a time. We have to do what we can to encourage it to take those steps.

-Drachasor

*I know some people might take me to task for using the term "liberal" here, since Communism is often associated with the left wing. However, China is more of an Oligarchy or Authoritarianism than it is anything approaching a real Communism (which probably couldn't exist with humans as they are now anyhow). If this talk about "liberal" doesn't make a lot of sense to you, dear reader, then you probably aren't an American (as I believe we use the term a fair bit differently than our friends overseas).

[drachasor]

My personal favorite device is the Iliad. It is the perfect size for most Dover books (that's a publisher of cheap books on many subjects). Since I take a lot of math and science classes and since I have a bunch of Dover books on these topics, this is a big selling point. OCR is good at reading text right now, but it can't handle mathematical equations yet (as far as I know and I have looked around). As such I prefer the device that can display things in their native size page per page.

I also like the fact it has a touch screen. I hope Irex eventually releases enough information so you can code anything for the Iliad and not just readers. It would be pretty cool to have it double as a drawing/writing tablet for my laptop. I also thing there are a ton of other potential uses for a device with so many features, many things none of the other devices coming out could duplicate. If Irex changes their position on this (which would be wise, I think), then I might even code some things for it too.

Sony's device will probably be too limited and DRM-crippled. The Hanlin would be my second choice (it equals or exceed Sony in every area as best I see). However, none of the devices save the Iliad can display all the various ebook formats natively (such as PDFs).

-Drachasor

PS. I bought myself an 800 dollar duplexing scanner with a large ADF so that I can cut the binding off my books and get them in electric format. I've thought about offering to do that for other people, but as a small business I think I'd get sued--even though I think it falls within fair use, the legal precedent falls a bit on both sides of the issue.

[Kosst Amojan]

TaKir - Wash my mouth? Hell I was being nice.

drachasor - I disagree but thank you for a rational criticism. I would agree with you but I've seenno serious pressure for a regime change there. The current government knows exactly what it is doing, by allowing Chinese companies to flourish they're just incresing their own tax base to keep their hold on power.

But this isn't a political forum, I remain doubtful about any high-tech products from China especially against two established and proven tech giants.

On the Irex, I am a bit concerned about its usefullness to me, I don't need or want any internet connectivity or a touchscreen (they need to have a second version). I am NOT going to pay $650 for an e-book reader, the added utility just isn't there.

That's why, despite the DRM, I'm going with the Sony. Most of the books I have currently are not DRM'd and those are probably a minority of what I'm going to use it for. I work for a DC think tank and mostly what I want to use it for is academic studies, papers, reports, etc. All of that is not DRM'd and mostly PDF (or easily convertable to PDF or Sony's format).

So this whole debate over specs is useless to me and I'm sure to several of you. It all depends what you're going to use it for. Me, being a political junkie, where it's from it important and of course price is also.

[drachasor]

Originally Posted by Kosst Amojan

TaKir - Wash my mouth? Hell I was being nice.

drachasor - I disagree but thank you for a rational criticism. I would agree with you but I've seenno serious pressure for a regime change there. The current government knows exactly what it is doing, by allowing Chinese companies to flourish they're just incresing their own tax base to keep their hold on power.

Of course. Change will happen because the future leaders of China are being exposed to more liberal views. Change will take time because the old guard will have to die off (or otherwise lose power).

[CommanderROR]

*BEGIN OT*

About the Chinese issue...I think we "liberalist Capitalists" have to be very careful there...we've had and still have our share of "dirty" leadership.
I've never been to china, so I don't know what it's likw there...but the chinese people I know here in Germany and the ones I know over the internet are all just...well...people very much like us here...and communism or whatever the Chinese are doing at the moment isn't worse in theory than our federal/liberal/whatever system is...practical translation is always the issue...and the chinese seem to be improving there...at least a bit...
What really scares me though is the Theocracy stuff going on in this Century (it's the 21st after all!!!)
Some people (and I'm not talking only Iraq here...) just need to realize that religion and politics don't mix. Crusaders vs. Holy Warriors of the Jihad is not something I want to see happening in my lifetime. In the dark middle-ages...ok...but not today...we have so many wonderful gadgets to look forward to...

*END OT*

[Snappy!]

Well, if we are going to skip the hanlin readers just because its made by a Chinese company in China, then heck, you can start throwing out most of the notebooks we use, 'cos a good lot of them, if not their parts are from China. Most if not all the products in Walmart come from China. This Averatec notebook I bought in US is from China. The US government is ordering a whole suite of lenovo notebooks form China. Are they in cahoots with communism now? :gasp:

IBM Thinkpads were made by lenovo for awhile before Lenovo bought over it. So IBM is a communism extension as well?

Gosh. How much more paranoid can we get?

Get a gripe on reality. The cold war ended. Long time ago. The Chinese government, like any other governments in the whole whole, including the republicans and democrats in US, all want to stay in power. Whether they are doing it honestly believing that they are doing their best for their country or for their self-interest is a different thing altogether.

Sure, communism do not have a good name, and was responsible for quite a bit of harm over the couple of decades, but the last I check, its a Republican President who declared war on a country over WMD only to admit later that they were unsure or that there were no WMDs. So who's the bad guy really?

Let's focus on the various ereaders for their own technological merits and suitability as an ereader rather than some far-fetched complicated implications. Peace.

[ultim8fury]

I voted for the Sony.

The Iliad whilst technically impressive, is for my needs, too feature rich. I don't need wifi, touch screen etc. I want something cheaper on which to read novels a book replacement if you will. Too many features has lead to a high price that I can't justify for my needs.

Hanlin V2. I don't really have any specific objections to this device. I'd like to see one in person. Its feature set is reasonable and doesn't add too much that I won't use. My political position doesn't prevent me from showing interest in a Chinese device. I just can't pin down what it is that doesn't inspire me to go out and buy one.

Sony. The one I chose. This is their second jaunt into the e-ink arena, which should mean they know where they went wrong and are willing to make the effort to improve. They are going to support the device with a content system. This is possibly the most important thing to me. DRM an evil of the modern world is to be expected but good DRM should never affect the user. In fact you shouldn't be aware of it. In the same way I don't notice the DRM on my iPod I don't expect to notice the DRM on my book reader. The convenience of a content system will allow 24 hour book shopping and getting to the end of a series of books in the middle of the night won't leave me annoyed that I can't get to a book shop before the weekend to either get something else to read or to buy the next installment. I like the physical design. It's clearly a book replacement device. Concentrating on features around the reading of novels. I don't read tech documents and it's been a few years since I was in college so search and annotation are redundant features as far as I'm concerned.

If the content pricing is right and the DRM transparent then I can see Sony doing very well out of this generation of readers.

[luag]

i voted for hanlin.

v2 seems to offer the best balance between features and price.

[javadou]

Could you pls explain me more details about the features and price?
Hanlin V2 is 349USD which is the same to Sony.

Originally Posted by luag

i voted for hanlin.

v2 seems to offer the best balance between features and price.

[CommanderROR]

well...the Hanlin has/will have a slave display for data-input.
It also contains some PDA apps (like a caldender) right out of the box and possibly it natively understands more file-formats than the Sony (this is just a guess, Sony isn#t too precise about their file-format support...)

The Hanlin V2 also provides/will provide an SDK so that 3rd parties can easily create new software...this is somehting i don't see happening fo the Sony. Hackers will probably manage to create firmaware hacks and stuff fo the Reader, but it's input options are very limited, so the chances of useful apps are limited too.

There is more, but I'm too lazy to remember right now...will anyone help me out?

[doctorow]

That pretty much sums it up. Or you can always check https://www.mobileread.com/eink/ for a quick overview how the next e-book devices compare to each other.

[doctorow]

I vote for the iRex because I am in desperate need of a bigger screen. Probably unlike most other readers I intend to read technical e-books on my next reader device. Obviously the bigger the screen here the better.

[lexico]

If I do actually buy one f these it would be the Iliad -- I'd mostly be using it for reading scientific papers from PDF files, and from experiment/experience 800x600 just isn't enough resolution for the typical font size (10 point for most text) if one wants to read a whole page at a time. 1024x768 on my Tablet PC is fine, however, and the Iliad has that resolution (if a smaller diagonal, but I'm short-sighted anyway...).

[TadW]

Originally Posted by lexico

If I do actually buy one f these it would be the Iliad -- I'd mostly be using it for reading scientific papers from PDF files, and from experiment/experience 800x600 just isn't enough resolution for the typical font size.

Ditto. My concern however is the limited support for PDF files. Especially when you take scientific documents, a proper formatting is often important, if not obligatory. PDF capabilities of the iLiad appear to be more of a rudimentary kind; with bad luck you won't have a better experience on the 1024x768 screen than on the smaller Sony Reader screen.

Btw, I voted for Sony Reader because I cannot afford the iLiad.