October 27, 2009
Reading Machines
An essential discussion is brewing on e-readers.
- Tim Carmody discusses single use reading machines.
- Jason Kottke notices that single-use reading machines, the Kindle and the Nook, are geared toward selling books, not reading.
- Marco Arment defends the current devices: “These are great devices for reading, even if you need to use one before you’re convinced, and any objection to their current software limitations is likely to be temporary.”
- Jason expands his idea and responds to Marco’s post arguing that, no,”The problem isn’t that you can’t route around Amazon’s design decisions with clever hacks, but that Amazon chose to optimize the device for reading (and buying) books.”
- Tim reflects, riffing off of Jason’s thoughts, on the differences between reading books and blogs and asks, “What a dedicated blog reader would look like?”
Time for Andrew to put on his thinking cap. In the meantime, what do you want from an e-reader/ebook reader/reading machine?
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I’d like my e-reader/ebook thing to include the ability to write on it in the same way I might write in my moleskine with a ballpoint pen (not like how you wrote in those Palm Pilots).
But my problem with the ereader is the limited scope. I want one device to do everything not several devices to several things. Ideally, I’d like a device, maybe with two displays (front and back?) one for LCD brightness and one for reader friendly e-ink.
Maybe that’s just crazy talk.
I don’t know if that is crazy. Perhaps instead of front and back it could open like a book?
That would work. It would also provide the opportunity to increase the size of the e-ink screen.
I finally tripped and fell down the rabbit hole of this post. Goddamnit, Andrew, I so didn’t have time for this, nor will I have time in the future for reading the three blogs I just added to Fever because of it.
Fortunately, I never open Fever anymore; I just add stuff to it. It has become my electronic circular file for things I feel I ought to read but that I know I will never actually read.
Do you think I can get that made into a compact, aesthetically pleasing mobile device?
Heh, sorry about that, India. And I certainly hope you will some time soon, but a device that also allows for epub and pdf formats which, as you know, is trickier than you’d think (unless you use LCD, I guess).
Oh, and don’t forget this one, India. It was done not long after I posted this series of links.
Not what you’re asking for, Michael, but getting there: the camelcap-happy enTourage eDGe.
That’s pretty close to what I was envisioning.
I think we should buy one to play with.