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?
