Shoppers who are serious about on line e-book reading should hold off on Kindle and other e-book readers unless they can fully support everything that a book already is and as it should be. Looking at e-book readers, there are a number of things that we want before we shell out 400 dollars for the system. Our lists of wants in an e-book reader are:
They should be full color for those manga and anime graphic novels, with a zoom function, some of those images are just too small, but full color representation is a must. Anything short of that means no sale.
They should be able to link to the internet for those scholarly or e-books with links embedded for other web sites that carry amplifying information. They should fully support text books for school, including the links to the text book web site so you can read your text book and use the text books web site for updates as the web site is going to be more dynamic than the book itself.
They should play DRM and Non-DRM protected files, any file document format really, from Open Office, PDF’s to any form of Microsoft Word. They should also do spreadsheets, and all forms of document sets, go beyond just the simple e-book format, but let’s make sure it is a powerhouse that can handle all the documents from simple text to everything else on the planet.
Let’s make sure that it has multi-language support, if we want to use it to increase our language skills, I want a split screen that will allow me to bring up different languages in the text so that I can use the thing to learn.
I want a touch screen to flip pages, scroll, make larger text, and make smaller text. I want to manipulate the book without a whole lot of pain.
Weird enough, it would be great if I can annotate the file with my own comments, great for research, or just keeping track of what I am thinking as I read the e-book like I can with a real book. Not only that, I want those notes indexed so we can back reference them, link those references amongst multiple e-books, and turn this into a powerhouse for simple research, cool quotes, or things in the book that we were particularly impressed by.
In other words, until e-book readers approach the same functionality that we can get in a book, there really is no point in shelling out any money for something that is substandard to the books that we have on our shelves. While they might be boffo, they have to compete with a real book, meaning they have to have all the same functionality that we can get in a book, plus some added things to make life generally better or easier than holding an actual book in your hands.
