Of course MY ebook reader has led to me reading all kinds of new stuff and buying far more paper books than I did before, so go figure.

Plus the books do pile up. And the Archos is an MP3 player so it plays audio books. Just plug it into the car stereo and listen to a book while driving.

We just need the right hardware. Too many of these ebook readers are trying to imitate books too much. They are too big.

psik

I found it hard to read past this statement. It is wildly counter-factual. In nearly every developed country in the world, manufacturing output is up, way up, over any significant period of time.

Manufacturing employment is down (even in China).

Hint: it takes less people to make things than it used to.

…and it would have been accurate (for a time, anyway).

From my perspective, there are a number of good devices out there, but no great ones. Many of them do good things, but there’s no one device that puts all the great features and interface together in an appealing package.

If Jobs were insane and decided to bring out an entry for this market, I can almost guarantee that it would fulfill 95% of what we all want out of a hardware ebook reader.

It’s a matter of time, though.

@ #1
I have to agree with you Sue, the tactile experience of hauling a small paperback around with you is a good one. I myself haul around several books, all the time for various reasons. Unfortunately, I tend to buy hardcovers because I can’t stand the 6-month wait for the paperback, so my satchel weighs a ton… and it’s a little embarrassing to have everyone knowing exactly what I’m reading, all the time.

If the physical experience of reading a book is better than the physical experience of reading from an ebook reader, that just tells me that the ebook reader isn’t good enough yet, not that it never will be.

Books do not have an analogy with audio or video – in that the broadcaster AND the receiver requires power to operate. Crystal radios and photographic prints excepting – the consumer needs an energy source to enjoy them.

There are basically two ways a paperback beats a PDF. A reflective rather than radiative viewing area, and a cheap power drain (amortized over the expense of transport). Those are technological problems – can you be certain they won’t be solved in the next half decade? I certainly am not.

All the lawyers I know go through several forests worth of paper every year reading contracts, making changes and re-printing the contracts etc. Get them comfortable with the technology and the potential cash savings alone will convert half the legal profession in 6 months.

As for the manufacturing issues: The Chinese factories make a lot of small batch run products already anyway. One more won’t matter and a lot of the internal ebook reader technology is off the shelf stuff anyway.

Finally I think that the people who rave the feeling and smell of paper books don’t read a lot of second hand novels. Paper absorbs all sorts of things from the environment around it. A book that was previously owned by a smoker can be a really smelly thing, and I don’t even want to think about second-hand porn novels …

I have used Plucker in the past and am using Vademecum (a Plucker replacement on Winmob) and MobiPocket now. These make reading very easy and convenient.

Incidentally, second-hand porn magazines used to be a staple of a certain kind of junk-shop here in the UK- a shop I know in Cambridge still had a boxful when I was there last year. But no, I wouldn’t much fancy buying those.

Who knows what sort of ebook-display people will be using in 2020? Some will want a dedicated display; others will use their phone, their PDA, or some other all-in-one device not yet even dreamt of. Who knows how they’ll even read? Maybe their ebooks will read aloud.

Predicting the future is a waste of time.

E-books with e-ink displays are better than cellphone/PDA readers because e-books have:
1) Larger display
2) Reflective rather than radiative
3) Low power
4) Potentially integrated editing/bookmarking functions
5) Flexibility (soon)

And the what e-books hold over printed material is:
1) Updatability
2) Animation/audio
3) Vast storage
4) Ease of access to titles (through internet downloads)
5) Search functionality
6) Color (soon)
7) Integration with other technology applications

E.g., http://www.lgphilips-lcd.com/homeContain/jsp/eng/inv/inv101_j_e.jsp?BOARD_IDX=1280

These types of displays will be the future – for books, advertisements, newspapers, and probably even computer displays – even if it takes 25 years. Just because a technology is still nascent doesn’t mean it’s dead end.

Books are the greatest technological achievement of all time. They’re not going anywhere. Certainly not for any $100 or £100 gizmo that I’m going to throw away in a year. Maybe — maybe if they were free.

Every attempt to date to “go paperless” has created a massive increase in paper usage because of people printing the same stupid garbage over and over, in drafts and repeats.

I like ‘real’ books, a lot, but living in a non-English speaking country means that you can’t find many English books and, when you can, they’re pretty expensive. So ebooks are the salvation :)

Although I use my Palm Lifedrive to read a lot of articles, I don’t think I’d read a novel on it…but a bendable, paper-like device with a (optionally?) passive display and which doesn’t feel like a phone/PDA/MP3/navigator could change that pretty quickly.

The only problem is price and that’ll change soon enough. Amazon in particular is trying to milk the early adopters, I suspect, or at least is unwilling to take a loss on the Kindle since they’re paying so much for marketing. But the price will drop soon enough. When the Kindle is around the same price of similar portable devices, say the Nintendo DS or Sony PSP, it’ll be hard to argue against. Reading on an e-ink display is more pleasant than reading on an LCD. The refresh rate is only ever-so-slightly annoying, but you get used to it. The built-in radio over which to buy books is fantastic when you’re in an airport, say, and the longer I’ve used mine, the more full it’s become of books I intend to read in the future. (Including those Tor books; I read Scalzi’s Old Man’s War for the first time on the Kindle. I doubt I would have plowed through it so quickly on a laptop, especially considering the distractions of reading on a PC.)

A $100 eBook reader filled with a few hundred of your favorite books does provide advantages that other devices (including paper books) do not. I, too, am skeptical ebook readers will be a big breakout hit in the short term, but I think once the price falls they’ll be able to carve out a healthy niche, especially with book lovers.

I got it for Xmas, and I’ve used it a lot. But, then I spent a couple weeks away from it while I read a normal book. I really missed using my Kindle during that time. The real book was kind of annoying to use.

Now, I’m back to using my Kindle again, and I’m happy.

I hope you’re wrong, because if the market for Kindle dies, I’ll be very unhappy.

1- it ignore the ever increasing popularity of e-books, recently boosted by Amazon’s kindle.

2- ignores the imminent release of highly anticipated new generations of A4 sized e-books, which are expected to cost around $100 by 2010.

3- all these portable devices will receive the equivalent of a steroid shot by the new very low power consumption processors (like Intel’s Atom). Combination of next-to-zero power consumption epaper with these processor babies, will produce extremely feature rich e-books that will go for days without charging.

4- most importantly, it’s based on unforgivable ignorance of basic economics – Not to go into details, I assure you, there is a market for e-paper, and the Chinese will be more than happy to mass produce them.