“The new reading experience”

By Dick Swart on 24 June 2010

Next year I’m going to do my ‘masters’ study and I’m looking forward to it.  My research subject will be “The New Reading”.  In anticipation of this research I bought -  no my wife bought me - an e-reader called Be-Book. I – I mean my wife – choose this one because it had a touchscreen and Wifi. IThese features seemed handy and the are. My first reading-experiences with are quit good. I like it. Its light, you don’t have the feeling of a ‘computerthingy’ and reading from e-Ink is definitely better than Light emitting screens. So as a consumer I’m not unhappy with it. As a developer I’m anxious to explore the limitations.

Now before you start yapping that I should have bought an iPad let me say this.  An I-pad has way to many distractions to be an e-reader. Sure it’s suits to read popular magazines and check your mail and lord knows what more Steven Job allows me to do with it. but its not the same as an e-reader.

The limitations of my e-reader make it valuable as a tool for reading. And by reading I mean books: real books, novels, literature, non-fiction and not trivia. the iPad is like McDonald as Be-Book is like a decent restaurant. Both are needed in this world. And of course. There will be much more iPads (and clones) sold eventually than e-books. In the same way that more food is eaten in fast food restaurants then decent restaurants and more magazines are sold than literature (I think)

So to all you future iPad owners momentarily swimming in Apple’s new fish trap I show you my middle finger by saying that my Be-Book is the iPad for intellectuals and gourmets, for people with taste who kind of ‘like’ its slowness, its low functionality and poor interface. Its for people who have eaten and survived Epoise and still prefer it above cheap Cheddar.

The Be-Book has a SDK, so you are able to develop new applications for it. But it has of course many restrictions we’re no longer used to. For instance, my Be-book has only 16 shades of gray but I’m already looking forward to come up with graphic concepts that deal with this.espacially when you see that the white is a bit off-white and the black has a little blue in it. Its like the old days when I had to design graphics in 16 colors of the windows system pallet. I’m dying to design all kinds of ‘slow food’ applications for my be-book for people who can appreciate it.

Anyway its quit a sensation to read in the midday sun like a mad Englishman. And I’m convinced that in 10 years eInk will be the norm. I’ve read that a Dutch spin-off from Philips called Liquid Vista is going to hit the market soon with color screens in e-ink. The next Tom-Tom the Volkskrant boasted. I believe them.

There is only one thing I’m not used to yet. You don’t have to turn the damn thing off. If Wifi is off and you don’t turn a page the power consumption is basically nill. But my faulty intuition tells me otherwise. “Turn it off, turn it off! ’ a little voice shouts to me every time I see it lying on the table ‘Or you’ll have to recharge it again and again and again just like your iPhone”. 

tagged with: e-reader, be-book, ipad

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