E Paper or LCD electronic e-book reader?
- Thread starter Holytomato
- Start date
Always-on EVDO for free? It'll be interesting to see how they cover that financially.
AG, currently rereading the 1632 series by Eric Flint on my phone.
AG, currently rereading the 1632 series by Eric Flint on my phone.
These type of devices are finally starting to pique my interest. They seem to be getting there with the look of the text, the size of the unit and long battery lives. But I guess I like have a hard copy of things, for at the very least backup purposes. I guess I always worry the device will fail, and the digital copy will be lost, and I've wasted my money.
These devices are rubbish and cost too much...
the amazon kindle 400 dollars ...more than computer a or even a laptop...totally wrong..overpriced...inflexible and drm'ed and cannot be any good...monochrome not even color....i want something that is not more than $20
You're going to be waiting a long time for the price point on the technology to come down to that point. And you're probably going to hate the technology when it gets there, because the price point on tech usually drops when better technology to perform the same purpose comes out. Look at the various incarnations of Palm PDAs before Treos came out if you need a shining example of that. Grayscale PDAs became dirt cheap when color PDAs came out, for instance.
Actually, the Kindle's price point is lower than the original price point of the iPhone. Look how many people were willing to shell out $600 for those.
Those who want the product will pay the price. The iPhone is a shining example of that. The trick is making the product desirable to those who will pay the price.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I wouldn't pay the asking price either, but the devices are starting to get to a point where I think I'd want one... maybe not the Kindle in particular, but some of the ones that I've seen on technology shows look interesting.
It is a rip off.
You can buy a laptop for that much.I was reading A PC MAGAZINE and that was saying $250 desktops by late 2008.
We already have solid state mp3 players COSTING LESS than $20 with lcd and other screens which can display text/video and ebooks but the screen are too small to be useful for book reading.
ALL SOMEONE HAS TO DO IS ADAPT/HACK ONE OF THESE TO DRIVE A LARGER SCREEN FOR TEXT FOR UNDER $20.
in fact I ask for you to spread this idea around and ask your friends,collegues about this challenge.
I mean it cant be that difficult to get a conventional mp player with ebook capability to be adapted with a larger screen.
People can mod cars,computers,iphones why not mp3 players...?
So could you please start asking around about this challenge?
Perhaps we could put up a small prize as a incentive.
Deleted 2
Vice Admiral
That quite depends.
Volume matters for electronic devices, I'm afraid. Nevertheless, you can easily get a Palm (second-hand or new) for about $50, which should serve very well.
The only thing you won't get is the e-Paper technology that makes devices like the Kindle interesting and noteworthy.
In your opinion. When there are people out there willing to pay the money, then the companies are going to charge it.
Take a look at the specs for those machines, and I wouldn't be surprised if they're pretty bare-bones. But if that's all you want your computer for, then they're great.
If you're a gamer, though, something like that is rarely going to be sufficient.
And mostly, that's thanks to the price of memory coming down like a stone in the last few years. Compare a "run of the mill" computer today versus the same level of machine even three years ago, and look at the difference in price and features.
We do? Could you please provide a link for this? I live in NYC, where there are the cheap electronics stores on about every fifth corner, and I don't recall seeing anything like this.
If you're so convinced this can be done, why not try it yourself?
We would need to be able to FIND these "conventional" MP3 players with LCD screens, personally. I'm sorry, but it's difficult for me to believe these devices exist commercially without some kind of proof. Give us an example of the kind of a device you think you could be modified.
I don't think I could even go to Radio Shack and get the parts for that for under $20, to be quite honest. But I'm curious.
You think is that easy eh? That larger screen will need more power, which means two things, a shorter battery life or bigger/expensive battery to last longer. According to Amazon, the Kindle will last up to a week with no wireless (optimistic, like every company) connectivity. I'm a mechanical designer. You always have design compromises. Or else you price your self out of the market. What you are suggesting would cost more then $400.
I would think this would be great for a college students that wouldn’t' need to haul around a couple of pounds of books.
I think it would be great if Amazon would keep a record of books purchased (like a wish list) so that if the device fails, you could re-download those books. I don’t see a way to backup currently on the Kindle (unless it has a memory slot). Also, what happens when you use up all the space? Do you just delete books that you bought in order to have room for the new ones?
After reading an article or two, I believe they do keep a back up on your amazon account for you.
Uptightgirl
Lieutenant
I too would love to get these but they are just too expensive and limited.I have ebooks both as .txt,.doc,and rtf files on my mp3 player but the screens too small.
