Ah, But!! I live furth of the USA and Canada (in Scotland), and those
readers are not available here (or anywhere in EU, as far as I can make
out). No one can tell me why - the providers all talk about
incompatibilities, but don't explain what they are; others say the market
is too small to justify it, which is plainly nonsense. However, I pin my
hopes on Iliad, which Phillips (Netherlands) are likely to bring out in
April, but the price is not yet announced. In the meantime I hump my
ancient Thinkpad up and down to bed!.
The DVD player inquiry was just the tail end of an earlier search - in
case one could be found that ran text - their screens are mostly big
enough, they are much lighter than laptops and some are very cheap. But
alas, none does text!
The aggravation of the US/Canada restriction is that it is highly
probable that whatever the incompatibility it could be overcome by a
simple adapter or by quite simple software of some kind. It is
incomprehensible to me that the providers of these devices have not made
some kind of modification which would open up this potential market to
them - What is the population of the European Union? and India and China,
even more, a huge market waiting.
Robert Sutherland
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
At 23:31 20-01-06, you wrote:
In a message dated 1/12/2006
12:15:48 P.M. Mountain Standard Time, robsuth@robsuth.plus.com
writes:
- enquiries as far as I could, but
found no product among the DVD portable readers that would deal with
text, nor was any of the manufacturers interested in producing one. Apart
from the French reader Cybook (which I think is too expensive for the
task and market although otherwise for the most part ideal) there seems
still to be no special ebook reading device available in UK or the EU
generally: laptops are still too big and heavy, and PDAs still have far
too small a screen My enquiries confirmed my strong impression that there
are protectionist interests holding this back, presumably in the
interests of proprietary issues of ebooks.
I suggest you go to eBookWise and FictionWise. Although they do not
deal with DVD portable readers, they are seeking input into what people
need and want, and would be very glad to hear from you.
My husband, two of my daughters, several of my friends, and I all use the
eBookWise reader which you can find for sale for about $100 at
eBookWise.com. By using extra memory cards, you can build immense
libraries, or you can use only the memory built into the device and build
an immense library on your computer, realizing that you'll have to
download often. I have six memory cards and would like to have about
sixty more, but they aren't free.
Anne Wingate
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