Funky gadget phone Edith!

In the meantime my only mobile gadget reading is when I use my INQ1 to catch up with blogs via Google Reader – teeny text but that means I get a decent amount on a screen!

I enjoy reading as much as the next person but I enjoy reading because of the content, not the format. As long as the device is a decent size and doesn’t strain my eyes at all, I can certainly see myself curling up with an ebook reader and being just as happy as I would be with a physical book, if not more so. I certainly think it would suit my bedtime reading more, it can be very difficult to hold a larger book when you’re tired and lying down in bed!

I’ d be perfectly happy to junk my paper collection in favour of electronic in a second. Save me a huge amount of space, and to have my entire collection in my pocket – brilliant! What I find interesting when people are talking about the book is the attraction of the artifact. People like the sense of touch and the physical sensation of holding a book. We get that from a very early age, and my feeling is that it’s an attraction to be comfortable and so on. Once children start using e-books they will get an entirely different emotional attachment, and will look at books in ways that we can’t really comprehend.

Books – as items that we purchase and use on a regular basis have no more than a generation left. I won’t be particularly sorry to see them go.

Ian – I personally don’t find the backlight an issue, but as Damyanti has highlighted, this may be more of a problem in the dark (especially when you’re tired!). I’d love to try an e-book reader but I can’t imagine me using it enough to justify the cost really. Waterstones don’t have any in their stores to look at do they?

Damyanti – it’s great that you have them at the library, I hadn’t even heard of the BeBook or Iliad! Shame no one is using them though, are you loaning them with books already loaded on or as blank readers? I can imagine it could be useful to loan them with key readings already on there for particular courses/modules.

Matt – I was surprised at how much space is dedicated to buttons too, I was really surprised when I realised the Kindle had a full keyboard. OK, you need to type things to search every now and again but personally I’d far rather have a smaller device or a larger screen by using an onscreen keyboard.

I tried another e-book reader on my iPod last night (Beam it Down) which was quite interesting. Instead of tapping the screen to turn the pages, the application used the accelerometer to scroll the text as you read. Nice idea, but I found it a little juddery when it scrolled slowly and I don’t like having the font size so big that it needs to scroll quickly.

Having used Stanza though, I do think there needs to be a few years of work yet before things work well enough for me to get an e-reader over a book. Firstly, the screens I’ve seen (and I’ve NOT seen a Kindel yet) aren’t as comfortable to read as paper. Secondly the dedicated readers have too much “computer” in them design-wise at the moment. I do not want buttons and UI bars and such – I want something as thin as an iPod touch, but with a warmer feel (moleskin cover or something) and with a display about the size of a regular paper-back. And, no buttons or keyboards and clumsy UIs. The iPod has the best UI of the readers I’ve seen by far. guestures and multi-touch are so much more intuative and “bookish” than clicking buttons and bringing up tree menues.

Interested to read your thoughts on Stanza. Haven’t actually downloaded it myself yet, but assumed that it would be difficult to read from that for an extended time (mainly due to backlight). The Sony Reader doesn’t have a backlight and is very easy to read from.

And I agree, it will be a while before they ‘take over’ if ever. At the moment they are not that easy to get hold of (at least not at reasonable prices). Once they start being sold cheap, they will really take off.