one of the things i really don't understand is why e-books (or e-book readers, i am talking about the specific devices, not some content format) do not gain any traction. picture a thin and light device with a great display you can read in any light, which has to be recharged every month and holds all your reading material. that's what i want!
now, since e-ink has been developed to the point that can be used in consumer products, there is no principal reason why there are no reasonable e-books around. sometimes i think it is a conspiracy by adobe so that the world continues to use pdf and flash and other non-web formats which generate a lot of money, instead of switching to more reasonable formats. for my Web-Based Publishing course i almost got a couple of irex iliad devices for my course project, but when i thought i almost had them, irex simply stopped answering my calls. the company is in trouble, i have heard, and when you look at this video of an iliad in action, you know why...
i was interested in the fact that the iliad also has a browser and a wireless interface, and i wanted to use it as an alternative publishing platform for xml content. maybe i wait for the next version...
even worse is sony's reader, another incarnation of sony's downright hostile attitude towards customers who dare to stray outside of the sony universe. while it has a pdf reader, the resolution of the screen and the implementation of the pdf reader make it impossible to read any pdfs in a reasonable way, leaving you with nothing but sony's e-book shop (the reader has no browser for looking at web pages). the hardware is beautiful as usual, allegedly has brilliant power management and works very well, but who on earth wants to buy a device for only reading sony e-books? this reminds me of sony's early attempts at marketing ipod-like devices, which were so limited in their functionality and so customer-hostile in their drm implementation that even sony junkies could not stand it. sony and apple often are really amazing in their masterplan to keep all their customers closely herded around their own trough, and most customers don't seem to care that much...
anyway, i am still hoping that some day some company will actually produce a decent e-book, which has a good pdf reader and also a good web browser and generally would be a viable alternative to schlepping the laptop around. i would love to take out my e-book and read something over lunch, but i will never do that with my laptop, so i am still printing much more paper than i want to. hey, industry, get your act together and give me what i want! i am willing to pay for it! and i am pretty sure a lot of other people, too, if you give them what they want.