Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology

Some that have been writing about the Apple iPad thinks so.

If so, it’s been a long time coming. If you are in the know, proper e-book readers or e-readers have been around for over 10 years, yet without much commercial success. Instead, audio books (stored on CDs or downloaded) have been the step beyond paper books, and paper books are as popular as ever, especially pocket, that are flying off the shelves.

Amazon and its Kindle and ditto in-device purchase system broke some new ground, and is kind of analogous to what Apple did with the iPod and iTunes (read: established a complete infrastructure), yet not being nearly as successful as the iPod.

The iPad is in my opinion not a given winner in any way, and remember that Apple has had some huge flops over the years. Hopefully the iPad will not be put on that list.

Even so, I hope it’s time for e-books anyway considering the benefits, that people (irrationally?) have hard to understand:

• You carry along your whole library of books and magazines, without breaking your back. As some e-books / e-pads also have browsers and wireless connection, you can also get knowledge online without switching device.
• Magazines are updated dynamically, and possibly many times a day, the same way online magazines are, with latest news immediately available and with possible alerts about breaking news.
• An e-reader is much more portable and practical than a laptop for reading information.

As the iPad is more of a portable computer than an e-reader proper (in my opinion), there are a few important issues, compared to the Bookeen e-reader (as that’s the one I have):

• Battery life is only 10 hours. A normal e-reader lasts days. Especially when reading literature, this becomes a hazzle, so you are very likely charging the iPad constantly, so you don’t run out of battery just when it starts to get exciting. The battery of the Bookeen lasts “forever”.
• Long term readability is poorer due to a color LCD display rather than EInk or similar. This is arguable though, as I have no problem reading from a backlighted LCD display for hours, but some might consider it tiring. The Bookeen has EInk that’s very comfortable to read, but page flipping speed is admittedly too slow for comfort.
• It’s more clumsy and fragile than proper e-readers. The Bookeen can be thrown around, and seems generally quite forgiving when it comes to scratches etc, and it’s also very light. That’s not the case with the iPad, that’s as fragile as the iPhone.

Apple will sell e-books via iTunes, and will therefore compete head-on with primarily Amazon. I don’t care who wins, I only hope people will see the light (finally) that e-books make sense.

Posted by Anders Borg 12:24 | Permalink