piranha | my ideal ebook reader

firecat asked how the kobo falls short of my ideal, and a) it's a long list, and b) it's not that the kobo falls short in specific, but that all ereaders fall short at this point, so i thought i separate this from the reader review itself.

full text search.
full colour, high resolution, primarily to view images. though i could live with high-level grayscale instead and forget about reading graphic novels/comics on my ereader.
comics view functions, if i get colour e-ink.
foreground and background colour/contrast control.
intuitive navigation.
annotations: highlights, notes, drawings.
clipboard.
bookmarks.
integrated dictionaries of my choice.
wifi/3G/bluetooth (this is not a top requirement).
if the above, then also integrated google/wikipedia lookup.
integrated translation for several languages of my choice.
several fonts of my choosing, as well as sizing.
tagging of books.
handle the major formats so i can stop converting.
touch screen (pressure-sensitive stylus would work best for me, but multi-touch could make navigation very easy).
handwriting recognition.
split screen or easy switching back-and-forth so i can see different passages at once.
open-source OS.
external memory expandability.
good library management.
lightweight.
decent battery life (a full day would be acceptable, a week would be fabulous), and quick charge.
USB connectivity.
rugged.
well-priced (and naturally it should come with a pony).

i don't ask for much, do i. *snrk*.

i don't need easy integrated purchasing from anywhere i am, and i can totally live without wifi as well; that would just be nice for looking up information. i'm also fine without audio.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Posted by

maize

What I find fascinating about lists like this is how much *more* people want a Reader to be able to do than a book, given that usually these are sort of, "To get me to transition from a book, a Reader would have to..." lists. Books can't do the majority of these things -- certainly far, far fewer of them than readers can. (I think the only one books do that Readers don't is a full-colour paper-like display. I suppose they do an extremely limited form of split-screening as well, although it can only show consecutive pages.)

That said, it's a nice list, and a device that did all that would be pretty sweet. I'd want one that has no touch screen, though. I've had the Sony PRS-505 and the PRS-600, and the big difference between the two is the touch screen. I very seldom use the touch screen (only when the interface forces me to) and I miss the extra hardware controls the 505 had since it didn't have a touchscreen. Also, the touchscreen layer reduces the contrast of the display and makes the screen look less sharp. I'm not positive if the touch screen is to blame, but I suspect that it's also why it gets much poorer battery life.

A lot of this probably depends on what people read. I've heard that the iPad is a dream for reading comics and graphic novels, for example, and I can totally see that.

Posted by

seryn

In exchange for restricted content licenses, a technology-dependent medium, and high initial expense for the device (and no cost savings for books)--- I have to be getting something better than a paper book.

Posted by

piranha

*nod*. the restricted content licensing pisses me off the most. in fact apple's attitude led to me not buying an iphone, because i don't need a nanny for my content, KTHXBYE.

i do not demand a lot of cost savings from ebooks because it really isn't _that_ much cheaper to produce them. some, though, yes.

i'm not sure what you mean by a "technology-dependent medium"? books are also technology- dependent, at least the mass market paperbacks i usually buy.

Posted by

seryn

Technology-dependent medium: If you don't have power to charge it and a means to get books (until the Kindle you had to download to your computer and plug your reader in; the readers didn't have a means to buy directly) you have a paperweight. A book is a book pretty much no matter when you pick it up. If you're homeless and you have a book, you can still read it.

Supposedly in the late 80s, the price of books skyrocketed because of a massive increase in the cost of paper. Books went up about 30% between when I was first buying them for myself and when I had a grown-up job.

Most non-new paperbacks are available 4th book free on Amazon and in person at Borders (during a sale). So in the paper version I'm paying $5.50 or so for a $7.99 list book. I don't see any reason why I shouldn't expect that kind of pricing from e-books. After all, I can't give it to someone else who might enjoy it if I want to bin it after 2 chapters, so it shouldn't cost more than the paper one.

Posted by

piranha

ah, that's what you meant. hm. that kind of technology dependence would be a concern to me if i were away from civilization for a while, but that's not generally the case for more than a couple of days. if i were homeless i'd probably sell my ereader for food, *wry grin*. but as it stands, so much of my life is dependent on technology that one more thing makes no difference.

and because i am never far away from a home with electricity (whether that be the shack or the boat or the truck), i prioritize differently. neither the boat nor the truck have a lot of space for books -- one tiny ereader is a total boon because i no longer have to agonize about losing my library once we permanently move onto the boat.

sure, paper (and warehousing and shipping to distributors) costs, and those costs aren't there for ebooks, but from the various analyses i've read, it's not as much as one might think. i wish i had bookmarked; just a couple of months ago i read a really good breakdown from an industry insider who's not in the pay of the industry. *ack*. can't even remember her name now. sale books are often loss leaders, i don't think one can fairly judge from that.

also, i would really like more money to go to the authors, most of whom don't get nearly enough pay to even make a living. $5.50 a book isn't sufficient at the current royalty rates.

Posted by

piranha

my list isn't at all dependent on what books can do, because we have better technology, so we can improve a lot on what books can do. books are not my dream technology and never have been. :) i basically put everything on this list that i've long wished for from my reading experience. i'll quite happily leave books behind almost entirely at that point -- though there is a special pleasure to holding a beautifully bound and typeset book, and i cherish the few hardcovers i have with personal dedications by friends. but most of my books are mass market paperbacks which fall apart sooner or later anyway.

re transitioning: the main thing that's held me back from buying an ereader before were limited availability of ebooks and the price of the reader. the former has really come along and is steadily continuing, and now finally the latter is in my ballpark as well.

books can do "split screening" because i can have several open at once and arrange them around me (important for research).

i bet the ipad is wonderful for comics / graphic novels / manga. also for magazines, and for craft and art books. but it's just too large for me to read fiction on in bed, which is where i do most of my reading these days. i'll just continue to read those materials on my regular computer for now.

Posted by

seryn

From what you've said here, my main disagreements are with the order of the features you're wanting.

I want battery life. So I can take it with me on vacation and not need to charge it. Like a book. Color chews through battery so if it's a choice between a week-long battery and color, color loses. Also e-ink is vastly superior for reading to the types of color screens currently available, though I have heard rumors of new color technology coming out Real Soon

I need, it's an absolute rock bottom requirement that I can read in full sun. I admit that if the book could be self-lighting so I could read in bed at night, that would be quite useful as well.

I really want rugged. I'm probably a 6 year old when it comes to taking care of my electronic toys. Some of the e-devices out there are clearly designed so you have to buy 3 of them per year because if you breathe on it funny, it implodes.

There is absolutely no excuse for readers not having on-board library management and the facilities to read any type of e-book natively. I would not accept a crippled reader unless there was a significant cost savings. If you're charging me $350 for a device then you can probably afford an Adobe license to decrypt PDF at least for your centralized server.

I don't care much about the notes and annotations at all. I don't write in my books. I would like a good system of flagging passages because I often have multiple scraps of paper or sticky flags. Especially for cookbooks. Not that the annotations feature wouldn't be useful if it existed, maybe, but it's not important to me right now.

You said dictionaries... sure. As long as they're there to allow me to look up words used by authors and not just for bitching at me about my spelling in annotations. The current usage of dictionary seems to mean not something which provides extra-contextual meaning, but just something warehousing mediocre data for the spelling police.

I don't want my reading device to have wifi connectivity unless it is providing that connectivity itself. I don't trust all these hotspots not to be doing something nefarious with the traffic going through their network. It wouldn't be that hard for someone to create something to target fancy e-book readers.

What I want most though is for e-book sellers to stop assuming I'm some sort of criminal and gunking up my legally purchased material with DRM. If we had open formats, then the market would be wide open for someone to come along and create a TiVo-like device which is independent of the content and vastly improves the interface and user experience.

note: I do not have an electronic book reading device. I use the free software Amazon offers and grab only the books which are offered for free.

Posted by

piranha

oh, i didn't impose a particular order on the list. there are all sorts of items that i'd be willing to trade off on too.

yup, indeed, dictionaries for additional context, not for spell check. other people might need that, but i never use it; i'm blessed with good spelling abilities.

i don't write in my books either, but annotations are like stickies, only in digital form.

while i'd love a week of battery life, in reality i don't need it, because i am never away from a place to charge for that long. i no longer hike in the wilderness. but less than a day is really a pain -- i have a smartphone which i use for geocaching, and that runs through its batteries in a couple of hours. that's annoying as all heck, though i now have a USB recharger for the truck.

it's interesting to me that most current ereaders totally suck when it comes to library management. i think that's an indication that the developers think of it as a replacement for a book, not for a library, and are not anticipating that many of us out here see it precisely the other way around, cf gam0ra and jesse.