PCA Forums

First really practical e-book reader?

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/our-kindle-v ... 325939.php

Been hearing a lot of positive reviews on podcasts as well and the thing sold out immediately so there's a definate interest.

What I find REALLY intriguing is the FREE cellular EVDO connection. You can't browse the Internet with it (although I wonder if someone will figure out how to hack it) but you can read blogs, download newspaper subscriptions and purchase and download e-books from Amazon all without the need for a computer.

The bad side is it doesn't read PDFs or other formats that you may already own your own ebooks in. Amazon does have a service that allows you to email some documents (Word, JPEGs and some others but not PDFs) to them for conversion (at 10 cents per conversion) and then the reader downloads them.

Of course it's too expensive at $400 but if mass production brings the price down to say, $99, AND someone figures out how to hack it to read PDF and Microsoft LIT files (it's running Linux so how hard could it be?) then it might be an interesting device.

Quite simply not worth what you get for it. What about PDAs? They support many formats including PDFs and seem to work just fine. We don't need another lock-in product where one company is a sole provider.

FlyingPenguin wrote:First really practical e-book reader?

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/our-kindle-v ... 325939.php

Been hearing a lot of positive reviews on podcasts as well and the thing sold out immediately so there's a definate interest.

What I find REALLY intriguing is the FREE cellular EVDO connection. You can't browse the Internet with it (although I wonder if someone will figure out how to hack it) but you can read blogs, download newspaper subscriptions and purchase and download e-books from Amazon all without the need for a computer.

The bad side is it doesn't read PDFs or other formats that you may already own your own ebooks in. Amazon does have a service that allows you to email some documents (Word, JPEGs and some others but not PDFs) to them for conversion (at 10 cents per conversion) and then the reader downloads them.

Of course it's too expensive at $400 but if mass production brings the price down to say, $99, AND someone figures out how to hack it to read PDF and Microsoft LIT files (it's running Linux so how hard could it be?) then it might be an interesting device.

print is dead, text to speech my dear pengy, text to speech

TheSovereign wrote:print is dead, text to speech my dear pengy, text to speech

Text to speech? Is that a new technology I have missed out on? A want that. Then I wouldn't have to just look at the pictures.
mile

Sov, that sounds just fine except the BEST text-to-speech still sounds like a drab monotone. When you can get a computer to do text-to-speech and make it sound like a professional audiobook reader, then we will have reached the Star Trek Next-Gen era.