engadget.com — "..a 6-inch E Ink display, enough battery life for 7,500 page turns, support for DRM'd BBeB and unprotected PDF, TXT, RTF, and Word files -- but the big news is that this thing will in fact support RSS feeds. Sort of." Lots of good pics.
Sep 26, 2006 View in Crawl 4
nailpuppySep 26, 2006
At least the screen looks a lot better when you view the full image, rather than the retarded size that engadget listed them at.
abutovSep 26, 2006
Next gen desktop-based eBook reader - <a class="user" href="http://www.antair.com/products/adagio">http://www.antair.com/products/adagio</a>
spradlingSep 26, 2006
This is not a usual LCD screen, I'm not sure but I think it only consumes power for 'flipping' pages or refreshing, thus the ultra long battery life (and the measurement of battery life in page flips and not hours.The only situation where I see this being useful is when reading one of those last Harry Potter books.
stonedonkeySep 27, 2006
I could buy a lot of books for $350. The kind that you don't have to plug in, either. I would feel like a jackass if I bought this.I'm sure it's useful for archiving reference books and writing documentation, as someone above pointed out. But $350 useful? Sounds a bit niche.I've researched e-book prices online. In general, you save about a dollar over the paperback version. I would need to buy a lot of e-books for this thing to pay for itself.Books also take a lot of physical punishment, more than any general-purpose display device out there.You can also sell, trade, and loan paper books to people.Oh, and don't say an e-reader is environmentally safer. That's only the case until you dispose of it (or break it beyond repair). Then the scale shifts the other way.Also, why bother implementing an e-book store when there are several, well-established outlets?
coffeedemonSep 27, 2006
Would you rather burn the eyes out of your head staring at a tiny screen? If the sole purpose is readability then this is good bridge between something roughly the size of an iPod and a laptop screen.
flipside3Sep 27, 2006
@oGMoYes, wronged... it's just an expression. Sheesh!I've owned quite a few pieces of fairly pricy Sony equipment over the years that have just up and died on me, usually right after the warranty runs out... go figure. It makes me leery of buying more stuff from them.I'm in total agreement with you $99 + Open Formats + SD memory would be perfect.
hiscitySep 28, 2006
Just a bit of a follow-up to show why this is going to be a bust....from: <a class="user" href="http://www.physorg.com/news78593741.html">http://www.physorg.com/news78593741.html</a>""First of all, navigation is fairly clumsy. You can't just enter the page number and jump to the page, nor can you enter a word or phrase to search for, as you can when reading a book on a PC. To get around, there are 10 buttons that will each take you a 10th of the way through text. You can also jump to chapter starts, or return to bookmarks. Still, this is very much a one-way device, designed for reading a book straight through from cover to cover.This lack of interactivity is partly because the screen is slow to change, since it takes time for the pigments to move through the capsules. It takes about a second to display a new page. That means no scrolling through pages, and no note-taking on the screen - imagine having to wait a second for each letter you write to appear.Secondly, and less importantly, the Reader handles PDFs poorly. It doesn't allow you to zoom in on them, so if they're formatted for standard 8.5-inch-by-11-inch pages, the text will be illegibly small."" All for $350 ... yeah right.
pinky24Sep 28, 2006
the reason that the screen takes so long to load is that it isn't a normal LCD screen, actually it uses some kind of electric thing to draw black pixels out, after that though, the thing doesn't use any battery power until you change pages again.
Closed AccountOct 1, 2006
They are supposed to be demoed in kiosks at Borders IIRC. They should hit Borders in Oct. (the units, not sure about when the kiosks come; hopefully in tandem.)
senojjonesMay 12, 2007
i posted this comment somewhere, it bears repeating..Our Ebook died, no obvious damage although a 17yo did have it when it "died"..Sony wants $682 to repair it, when I asked how they could charge 2x the sales price they said it was unrepairable...It's still in warranty, but they claim the unit was damaged. it's very thin and probably easy to flex and break, and if you break it, it's toast....the problem is that my 14 yo son, who can read $100 worth of books in a week, loves this thing....and it was a Christmas present, so it will be replaced...the repair record may need to be watched for this toy....what you get for being an early adopter...