Is the Best E-Book Reader Here Yet?
For almost twenty years, the perfect ebook reading hardware has been 5 years away. We’re now down to waiting for a cheap enough, lower power enough paper-quality display with long battery life.
Once we have cheap and affordable e-business books, the medium by which we read will also be the medium by which can write and respond. Reading will cease being a solitary act and will become a social one eventually. You can see this already with blogs and the online likes.
So, I have been assuming that the ebook reader will mimic the form factor of books: display a page, and maybe make a rustling sound as the page is turned slowly. But it is taking so long for ebooks to arrive for the market that they may skip book emulation entirely and become general purpose browsers/composers. In which case, they will work better for blogs than for online marketing books.
In my opinion, format matters a whole bunch more than medium. In the physical world, format (e.g. hardcover, small-print soft-cover, magazine, etc.) gives a whole bunch of cues about the type and depth of the content. Maybe that makes a bunch of various of different ebook reader niches rather than an e-book monolith. In which case, they will work better for blogs than for online marketing books. I personally do not see ebooks catching on until they really have a format to them. Maybe that makes a bunch of different ebook reader niches rather than an e-book monolith. Who knows.
I think for business ebooks to become ubiquitous, the content prices must become reasonable (and currently they are not). RCA ebook readers ahve been around for years, but I still do not see people using them on the trains, buses and airplanes. So, yes, in that sense I do hope ebooks jump directly to supporting blog-like content, otherwise,before the perfect ebook hardware emerges and gain mass adoption we might wait another twenty years. Why? Well, that is because we all read Russian. And Russian ebooks are dirt cheap in the first place (if not free).
So, yes, in that sense I do hope ebooks jump directly to supporting blog-like content, otherwise we might wait another twenty years before the perfect ebook hardware emerges and gain mass adoption.