my ideal ebook reader

[piranha]

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.

Comments

[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.

[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.