Now that every company is beginning to develop its own eReader or tablet, you should stop and think about the features that will really be important to you rather than being swayed by the technology envy that leads to an unfulfilled life and short-sighted incrementalism. Let’s weigh the options.

1) Functionality

The iPad could be the future of board games, but not reading. Photo from Engadget.

The iPad has been heralded as the second coming. Indeed it can do almost anything (as long as it’s one thing at a time). However, don’t most people with an iPad already have a laptop? Why do you want another one? Who cares if it can play music or audiobooks? Don’t you already have an mp3 player or a phone for that? Maybe it will be handy as a big remote control or a new way to play board games. Perhaps it will work for textbooks, so you could watch a science experiment or test a mathematical formula. But it will not change the way that adults will read who do not need such bells and whistles.

2) Usability

Eventually screens will be both flexible and interactive. Photo from SlashGear.

CrunchGear reviewer Matt Burns is desperate to keep his terrible keypad on the Kindle. I still appreciate tactile feedback on phones, game controllers, and keyboards but is it really necessary on a book? You can swipe to a new page very easily, and only need a few buttons. Plus, eInk screens smudge a lot less than glass.

3) Legibility

The Notion Ink ADAM, Amazon Kindle, and Pandigital Novel compared in direct sunlight. Photo from Good eReader.

This was the feature that drove me to wait over a year for a tiny independent startup called Notion Ink to release my namesake, the ADAM. It is almost impossible to read LCD tablets like the iPad in bright sunlight. It is even harder to see eReaders in the dark because eInk does not light up. The ADAM combines both technologies into one screen so you can (kind of) read in any lighting. Then I started thinking… I never read in the dark, so what’s the point of that?

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I haven’t blogged here about technology and marketing much lately. Mostly because I have been too busy consulting on it at my new agency, Converseon, and wrote two articles elsewhere about trend curation and local search results. I’m also preparing for the panel I’ll be participating on regarding SEO and social media at the SheBlogs Conference next week. Too bad that even at a women’s conference, men end up speaking on SEO. I swear, search is cool!

I should also note that my company was recently listed among three leaders in the Forrester Wave for listening platforms. Last month, one of the other three leaders was acquired by SalesForce for over $300 million. That puts us in good company, and I’m proud to bring my decade of search experience toward the cause.

Converseon is working on some giant leaps forward in online marketing and social media research. Yet one of the things that bugs me about our consumer culture is that people focus too heavily on what is coming tomorrow. My good friend, futurist Garry Golden, summarized this to me recently by giving this short-sighted philosophy a name — incrementalism. Incrementalists are the people who last century would have preferred to breed a faster horse rather than embrace disruptive technologies like the train, car, or airplane. That kind of thinking leaves you susceptible to black swans and holds society back. It certainly doesn’t lead to revolutions in thought or action.

We discussed the topic after attending a Carnegie Hall talk with Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal and Sir Howard Stringer, Chairman and CEO of Sony. One of Mossberg’s early comments was that Sony Ericsson simply makes too many models of phones. Stringer acknowledged the fact but did not seem to indicate any change was on the horizon. If not, that spells a slow death for the joint venture with their Swedish counterparts. Perhaps it is unfair to pit their Q1 sales against Apple since Sony was hit especially hard by the earthquake in Japan. However, it is ridiculous that they currently offer 54 different types in America alone, where they are not even close to being a dominant player. They could easily make the world’s best phone again if only they stopped their incremental efforts and started concentrating more of their brainpower and budgets into creating a revolutionary new device. Imagine if they made 54 kinds of video game systems. Think PlayStation would be as popular?

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