On Tue, 12 May 2009, Jon Richfield wrote:
On the subject of reading on cellphones: I (deliberately) have an old, old, vanilla cellphone that I use for... for...
What was it for again?
Oh yes, for those conversion, er... conventio.. um... communication thingies. It can't do much, but then I didn't do thingies much, so that was OK. Now people are talking, not so much of intermittent communicating and computing on cellphones, but actual industrial strength, continuous READING on cellphones?
I can read a computer screen all day without strain, but can someone tell me what kind of cellphone can give you say half a page of print at a time in comfortable size, steadiness, contrast and readable resolution for hours on end?
*Is* it viable? I guess memory capacity couldn't be too bad if you have ram for photos, but what about battery capacity etc? Is it time to jack up my standards and look at modern equipment, or can I still represent my anachronistic foot dragging as simple sanity? Will a new cellphone be a better investment than a new, big Kindle with non-volatile screen memory? (I don't have an old, small one yet!)
Nervously,
Jon
This may be a generational thing. Amazon may be targeting the Boomers who want/need larger fonts, larger pages, read aloud, and all that jazzz. Cellphone makers in general may be targeting the generations of people who grew up with Nintendo GameBoys and thus think it has been just fine to see the entire world through a tiny window. Of course, those tiny windows are getting larger and larger but still not to the point where the Boomers are going to use them. The iPhone, Curve, and other clones are somewhere in between in size, with several times the screen size, perhaps even 8 times, if you consider the smallest screens, as the iPhone is 6 inches compare to just under 1 square inch for the smallest, while the Kindle is that many times as large as the iPhone. However, as seen in the last Newsletter, people ARE using small screens, even only 14 characters wide, to read eBooks, and, the iPod had applications to read PG eBooks in the very first week. It would appear that people, perhaps mostly only people younger than the Boomers, will read eBooks on whatever they have, while the Boomers may more likely insist on something compensating to make up for waning eyesight, something other than just pairs of cheapy reading glasses, such as I am wearing right now, just $1 at our local dollar stores. I buy many of these, leave them in all sorts of strategic locations, including on my computer. iPhones are currently selling 10 million per year, but we don't really know yet how many people are reading eBooks on them, but eBooks ARE available through the iTunes store, and applications to read eBooks, so we must presume some market penetration. On the other hand, both Amazon and Sony are very secretive with their sales figures on eBook readers, and probably won't make a real hardcore announcement on these until they each reach sales of over a million. If so, then they obviously have not reached over a million sales yet, either one of them. However, don't despair, look at how long it took for Apple from 0 to 10 million. . . . Thanks!!! Michael S. Hart Founder Project Gutenberg Inventor of ebooks Recommended Books: Dandelion Wine, by Ray Bradbury: For The Right Brain Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand: For The Left Brain [or both] Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson: To Understand The Internet The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster: Lesson of Life. . .