E-Book readers – excite us, please!
Nice comparison article from Wired here on the seven (yes, seven, where did they all come from?!!?) different competing E-Books that are now available to buy (though not all of them have hit this side of the pond so far).
Glancing through the specs though, not many feature colour screens. The producers seem focussed on making the experience as similar to the look and feel of the printed page as possible.
Which yes, I can see why they’d do that; people are used to it, it’s what probably they ask for in research groups – “can it look like a book please?”. Because that’s what people they expect.
But as Akio Morita (Sony Founder) said about the first Walkman, ‘I don’t think any amount of market research could have told us that our product will be successful’.
If you think about everything that’s possible with a screen nowadays, making it replicate ‘the printed page’ is just a bit lame. Why the hell would I want a £300 device that manages to look like a £5 book?
Come on, E-Book people, impress us a bit more… and excite us.
]]>