The iLiad and
the Odysseys
Bron: Ars Technica
Datum: 19.02.08 The iLiad ebook reader,
from Dutch company iRex, hopes to slaughter the competition even
as it carves a huge hole into your wallet. If you've been holding
off on ebook readers because they lack WiFi and the ability to scribble
in the margins, you might want to welcome the iLiad inside your
gates.
Sadly, as the Odyssey reminds us, attractive
and innovative mechanical products often hide some problems. You
won't be slaughtered in the night by rampaging Achaeans—certainly
good news—but you will have contend with some issues. But
the iLiad has a lot to like. Despite losing in the looks department
to Sony, the iLiad is one of those products that make you realize
just how incredible an entire category could become once the price
is right.
Scribbling in the margins
We're fascinated by the idea of ebooks, but implementations of the
concept have so far been dogged with flaws. Our in-depth evaluations
of the Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle turned up a long list of drawbacks
including high price, hard-to-click buttons, slow refresh rates,
DRMed content, poor music-playing functionality, and non-interactivity.
It's this last one that truly separates an
ebook from an actual book. While many readers don't need to scribble
notes, underline passages, or dog-ear the pages of the books they
read, it's an essential feature of paper book for academics and
others. Our own Jon "Hannibal" Stokes summed up the problem
this way:For most of us in the modern world, a book is a commodity
to be consumed and then discarded after one reading. But there are
some books that we go back to again and again, especially those
of us who are scholars by trade and who find ourselves butting up
against the same classics throughout our careers.
For instance, my dog-eared copy of Hans Georg
Gadamer's Truth and Method has six years' worth of markings in it,
markings that are valuable traces of an ongoing, interactive relationship.
On the day that I finally come across a suitable hardcover copy
of this book, I'll have to go through my old trade paperback page
by page and look for notes and markings to transfer over.
Writing directly on the screen makes the ebook
feel that much more like a "real" book. Annotating documents
with a stylus, drawing pictures, and even composing music on the
iLiad are all possible thanks to the inclusion of a Wacom sensor
board installed directly behind the screen. The board generates
a magnetic field, but does so only when the stylus is detached from
its cradle. A resonant circuit in the stylus receives the magnetic
energy and uses it to transmit a signal back to the sensor board,
which reads the pen's location, angle, and speed atop the screen.
It's quite accurate so long as you don't try to do engineering drawings,
and trying to draw notes on a staff of music is also tricky.
One byproduct of the custom stylus is that
the screen doesn't respond to fingernails, stray knuckle taps, or
non-iRex styli. This is a Good ThingTM... until you lose your stylus.
Writing means the iLiad is more than an ebook reader. It's also
a notepad on which you can scratch away to your heart's content.
I've done so below; if it's not obvious (and it's probably not),
this is my artistic rendition of Managing Editor Eric Bangeman taking
a spacewalk outside the Orbiting HQ.
read
more on Ars Technica
|
