Amazon Kindle
evangelisten in het Vondelpark
Bron: Marketingfacts.nl
07.07.08
Electronic
reading devices have the potential to reinvent a fine old technology,
but they have some way to go, finds Paul Gent.
The book is already a highly evolved piece of technology,
many claim. It is portable, shareable, easily navigable and relatively
cheap. How could it be improved by making it electronic?
I love books, but I have no difficulty imagining
how they could be improved. Indeed, I have been waiting for e-readers
to arrive ever since they were first mooted over a decade ago. Think
of something like a larger, slimmer iPod Touch that could store
thousands of books and dictionaries; you could download any book
ever published (they would never be out of print), flick through
them effortlessly and search them for that passage you can't quite
remember.
Unfortunately, in the real world you are stuck with
the iRex Iliad. For a start, it's a monster. It weighs in at 15oz
(425g) (conversion
table here) - that's roughly the same as a 700-page paperback.
Writing as someone who does most of his reading
on London's Tube, that fact alone would make it a non-starter. Earlier
this year, I bought the Bookeen Cybook almost entirely because of
its weight - a slimline 6oz (170g).
The weight of the Iliad means it's not just heavy
to lug around, it's tiring on the arms when you're reading it. It
can be held in one hand, but not for very long.
The legibility is excellent, it must be said. Like
all the current generation of e-readers - which includes Amazon's
Kindle and Sony's Reader - it uses a brilliant technology called
eInk. This is black on white and is not backlit, which means that
- like a book but unlike a laptop - you can read it in sunlight,
though not in the dark. And it doesn't strain your eyes.
And navigation? I have to admit my children twigged
this much faster than me. To go forward a page, you flick a bar
on the side of the device from right to left. It's like turning
the page of a book, you see. Duh!
On the other hand, they found the device's response
frustratingly slow, whereas I didn't mind the two-second wait.
Where the Iliad scores - and this is presumably the reason for the
extra weight it is carrying - is its interactivity. Unlike my minimalist
Cybook, it comes with a stylus that can be used for navigation or
for making notes, either in separate documents or on the texts themselves
- great for those who like to scribble all over their books.
To tell the truth, you can only write on some of
the texts. Why? Impossible to tell. The user's manual is a classic
written-by-geeks document, and seems to have had several important
chapters deleted from it. For example, there is a facility on the
Iliad for reading newspapers; great - how do you get them? The manual
is silent. The Iliad has speakers and a headphone socket - what
can you listen to? No idea. Can you search for keywords? Who knows?
You can clearly do a lot more on the Iliad than
simply read books, but you'd have to be a technical whiz to work
out what.
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