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10/12/09
10/12/09
I however definitely fall into the category of loving "novels and non-fiction" more than TV, movies, cookbooks and glossy magazines. I spend more time reading than all of the above combined and I simply do not enjoy reading off a backlit display. Be it my iphone or a 30" Apple Cinema monitor I just don't enjoy it and the eyestrain bothers me after only 30-40 minutes. If you could give me a tablet with an LCD on one side and an e-ink display on the other so I get the best of both worlds in one compact device SIGN ME UP!
10/12/09
When a dedicated device can do it's job in a far superior way to a multipurpose device, that dedicated device is not dead.
Only when a book is as comfortable to read on a multipurpose device as it is on a ebook reader, will they be dead.
10/12/09
You may just read around your house, but other people use textbooks in school for 7 hours a day, want to read during their lunch breaks or sitting in the waiting rooms of doctors.
If you read as many books as someone like my mom does (who knows what she wants for her birthday), a Kindle would be much, much better than any LCD screen.
10/12/09
10/12/09
When I think of the things I did when studying like highlighting, taking notes, coping down citations to use in my papers, all these could be done more easily with an ebook. The current state of e-ink is far from ideal but we already have the software end of the technology to do a lot of this really well. The hardware is a bit lagging. E-ink is too slow and the other screens in mass production need big heavy batteries.
Imagine if you could easily search your notes and see what they applied to in the text. Imagine highlighting a section to quote and being able to just pull it into your paper with the correct citation already added for you. Just being able to search a book helps tremendously. The ability to download the book rather than waiting on an interlibrary loan or a return would have certainly sped up a lot of my work. This is before you even get into the ability to add things like links, high-resolution images and multimedia to books. Just something simple like a map could be so much more useful if it were interactive.
10/12/09
10/12/09
I'm sure tablets will be huge whenever they start coming out. And we'll see what they are like when Apple releases theirs.
But let's not get carried away here, I wouldn't want to read a 1,000 page book on an LCD, especially in direct sunlight where the screen is almost unreadable. People don't read books like they read websites. For novels, people read it to relax, to unwind, to be less distracted. Sit under a tree or in the backyard on a lazy Sunday. Sometimes you want to be away from your e-mail...
The real issue at hand here is price. E-books are merely a novelty until they can sell them for $50-100. I've spent $300+ for my Kindle, and I've owned a Sony Reader before that, but for most people spending that much money on books is ridiculous. E-ink technology at the moment is expensive and limited, but its a mistake to think that it will always be that way.
Technology isn't stagnant (as we should know here), E-ink technology will change, will improve, become faster, cheaper, and add color.
Once we see these technologies mature, and see what these tablets are actually like (Apple's version has been rumored for years); then we can come back to this discussion.
10/12/09
10/12/09
im SURE it can be done.
10/12/09
10/12/09
then OLED would probably be the way to go, since if it's in front of an opaque e-ink display, getting a backlight through the to an LCD would eat tons of power unnecessarily.
Are OLEDs transparent when powered off?
10/12/09
10/12/09
nice catch!
@BLam:
what say you on this??
10/12/09
10/12/09
10/12/09
10/12/09
E-Ink does it purpose well. Brian never really said it didn't. The point here is that (close!) future tech will offer so many more opportunities to read digital print that having a single device specifically for reading is somewhat pointless.
E-ink will be a nice replacement; long term for libraries. I would love to see 'getting a library card' replaced with 'getting an e-reader'. Libraries could store their entire inventory as digital and work in a much smaller space. E-readers could be stacked on shelves instead of books and a user could select the book they want from the digital library. To 'take the book with you' you would need your own reader. Then you could even return & check out new books without ever having to go to the library. multiple libraries across the country (or even the world) could pool their resources and offer a much wider selection of reading material.
With all that said. Unless someone pushes the e-reader into iPod like status quickly; new tech will replace most of the market share.
10/12/09
It's really is not possible to read off a screen for an extended period of time. You can consult with a computer screen reference. You could read off of one for maybe twenty or thirty minutes at a time. But to study a text, to genuinely read a book for hours at a time? no chance.
I downloaded a pack of old literary essays, and tried to read a TS Eliot essay on my large, expensive, high res LG flatscreen monitor and it was pretty awful. It made my eyes feel itchy and unpleasant. It was horrible.
I think people might trust Brian's opinion on this if anyone actually believed that he was a reader; that he actually did what readers do - sit down with a book for an hour or two a day and give it sustained attention.
The "dead tree media" comment is a total giveaway. Anyone who actually reads and respects books wouldn't say that. It's contemptuous. So I don't trust his opinion on any technology devoted to reading.
10/12/09
"It's really is not possible to read off a screen for an extended period of time. You can consult with a computer screen reference. You could read off of one for maybe twenty or thirty minutes at a time. But to study a text, to genuinely read a book for hours at a time? no chance."
I think most people don't realize how often they look away from their screen while they're working.
10/12/09
Extended reading for example: I wear contacts or glasses (have for 30 years) and I have actually read a few books on a BlackBerry Pearl screen. I even read a few stories on my iPhone. Both are not much different from PC screens. and no, I wasnt reading short stories either; I read the complete 'Art of War' on my Pearl.
Different people have different thresholds. I also don't think Bri meant anything negative by his 'kids today are used to eye-strain' argument; I think his point was that later generations of people are developing better abilities. If you took a guy out of 1920 and asked him to read a book from e-ink it would give him headaches. Kids today stare at screens more than we do, their eyes are better developed for that purpopse and therefore do not experience as much strain.
This argument; much like Apple/Win could go on forever however. We will all have our opinions and only time will prove or disprove them.
10/12/09
I get no eyestrain with their screens, I can mow through a ebook almost as fast as a real one, color, music, yadda yadda yadda. And the battery life? I think I ran out of battery life on a plane once. But it was a 12hr flight and I was kinda expecting it not to hold up.
I've been thinking of getting an itouch or zune hd as my ebook reader upgrade.
10/12/09
10/12/09
e-Ink was meant to replace PAPER, not to be a new type of video display. Reading books on a flickering LCD screen is NOT the future of reading. The refresh rate of e-Ink (0hz) means it's equivalent of paper. Even a static image or text on an LCD screen is 30-60hz or more, which tires the eyes. Plus, eReaders only use power when they turn pages, a tablet is just a laptop without the keyboard and would require to be turned ON all the time.
Methinks the author is just an Apple fanboy drooling over a product that doesn't even exist yet (Apple tablet).
10/12/09
personally, i spend all day looking at a computer screen, and by the time i go to bed, my eyes are bloodshot and hurt. e-ink is a fantastic alternative to staring at a backlight, and is sure to provide a much more comfortable reading experience. as much as i'd love to have one iphone-like device with web access and holding all my books and magazine subscriptions, i don't want to take the only remaining time i spend consuming media but not on a computer, and spend it looking at an led/oled screen.
so what are some alternative ideas? maybe a tabled device that has a "hybrid"-type screen like the... olpcs i think? that has an oled mode and an e-ink mode? something that can both satisfy my desire for convergence and also give my tired eyes a rest.
10/12/09
The problem is that the people advocating LED and OLED readers - tablet readers - simply aren't themselves used to reading. You simply cannot read a text in a sustained way on the screen. Reading off a computer, you need breaks, you need space between to rest your eyes, you need time away from the constant illumination. Reading comments on a blog for a couple minutes at a time isn't the same as studying a text for a couple of hours at a time.
10/12/09
you don't need any software or hardware to read a paper book... but older media and data formats are already in danger of becoming unreadable, and hence the information held lost.
plus there's also the whole thing of proven technology...
10/12/09
Seriously, that page flash-I understand the necessity due to the technology. No idea how people (esp. fast readers like me) can bear it for a whole book.
I'll gladly charge my eBook every night for a color LCD/OLED display. My Sony may have better battery life, but then again, no one is using it.
10/12/09
If a netbook with a PixelQi screen comes out, I'll jump on it but I don't see it replacing a reader for me. It's at least ready for manufacture right now. All these wonderful prototypes we see now are likely years from mass production. How long have people been buzzing about OLED? It's still rare in devices.
10/12/09
Of course, maybe we just haven't had the right designers working on E-ink yet-the Sony has a plethora of other UI issues, and the Kindle doesn't seem much better, so I'm keeping my options open (as is Brian Lam, seems like)
10/12/09
And paper copies? Hell no. I'm not printing 1000+ pages and throwing it in binders. Not for what FedEx/Kinkos wants me to pay, hell no.
Could anyone recommend a decent e-book reader with PDF support that's on the cheap? All I ever see for 'cheap ebook readers' on eBay are those little 4.3" crappy PDA things that read .txt and nothing else.
10/12/09
Kindle DX would probably come closest, but it costs a lot more than you're willing to pay.
10/12/09
What I'd really like is remote control for the Acrobat pane so I could flip pages and zoom/pan without changing focus from my editor. Something like the media player hotkeys. Repurposing the numpad would be perfect.
10/12/09