Interested in ereaders

[Molly Tournquist]

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Evan Leibovitch > Sent: 09/27/13 10:45 AM
> The e-ink monochrome screens of the dedicated readers were
> nice, but not longer sufficiently good to compensate for the lack of
> flexibility.
But they're better than they were before. We're no longer talking about the likes of Kindle DX screens, which were huge, expensive and still not all that high res. If the low hassle of compact ereaders must not matter, it seems sensible for them to be getting generous boosts of resolution. Not that it would really matter, if technical issues and hacks were alike across the line, it would be a question of the soft point on the price curve. But that might just be what they'd want to do, high res to optimize them heavily for textbooks. Maybe even make them bichromatic.

> I now
> find the low prices of dedicated ebook readers the result of subsidy in
> return for locking you (or at least heavily steering you) towards the
> hardware makers' bookstore.
Subsidised platforms are a thoroughly accepted story, but how well does it actually work?

> Both ePub and PDFs allow for their documents to contain embedded Internet
> links; these are generally useless in a dedicated eBook reader whose
> browser is either horrid or non-existent.
It's hard to see how this fits in the whole context. It seems quite feasible for this to be handled by a freely tweaked open platform ereader(or even a device in between an ereader and an audio player). For example, by having a program that, while packing the ereader, fetches and converts the linked pages and even adjust them to a friendlier arrangement.

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Lennart Sorensen > Sent: 09/19/13 12:19 PM
> The audio part is really really pointless. In fact sony dropped audio
> support from their newer models because an ereader makes a lousy mp3
> player and it is a waste of the ereaders battery.
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Evan Leibovitch > Sent: 09/27/13 12:56 PM
> Audio playing, especially with the screen off, uses next to no juice. And
> even for a sighted person there is at least an occasional appeal from
> talking books.
Now this is looking a little confusing.

> If all you're trying to do is
> replace a paperback, the e-reader will do the trick. But newer generations
> of ebooks are being built with embedded multimedia capabilties (there's
> good reason the ePub standard was updated to be based on HTML5). And
> current ereaders can't deal with that.
Hopefully they're not talking about hooking the ereader up to a CD rom drive. Sounds very weird that they would still pitch it with a word like multimedia. That's already been plausible, and likely even interesting: take an abridged audiobook, stick the missing parts back in.
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