Op-Ed: The year of the E-reader? Believe it when you see it

A tide of E-readers, less primitive than their predecessors, with color and some with OS capacity, is coming in 2010. Great news for those prepared to pay a fortune for an LCD system, rather less great for others.

Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, drop a name, the e-reader is supposedly coming. Whether this is going to deliver any more than the previous pitiful efforts is highly debatable. “Literature for the masses” has been an ideal for centuries. Ironically, it’s now being achieved despite the market literacy of the providers. This medium has been bungled before, and the market seriously misread. The “El Gizmo” image doesn’t necessarily cut it with readers. Nor did something with the visual spontaneity of an old digital watch achieve decisive cultural breakthroughs. Those tedious, dull, boring looking things didn’t do a lot for publication, either. I want to do the equivalent of a new Book of Kells, with my Celtic books. It is quite impossible to do anything even vaguely visually interesting with a medium that can’t even match up to a basic phone in visual capacity. Can these things do that? Coverage says they can read color, but how many hoops do you have to jump through in production? Will PDF format color work? It should. Market noise doesn’t say so, though. It’s now at the “size matters” stage, with dialog to match. “It’s a browser, it’s a phone, it’s a netbook….” The Sell Your Apps At All Costs approach has a lot to answer for, when it comes to mentioning functionality for anything, particularly the function the things are supposed to be performing as core tasks. E-books are a far more efficient way of stashing your favorite books and avoiding hernias. I just recently moved a garage full of books, and if the exercise was healthy, the time and space usage left a lot to be desired. Let’s hope they don’t screw it up this time. Another issue is price. For the $300-500 price range, it's excluding some real market segments. After all, the people who need them can read, which is a serious social disadvantage which greatly reduces their income. Where are they going to get that sort of money?