I have in my personal library around 5000 books, most of which I read. These books were taking away 2 walls from the house I used to live in. Is nice to actually read a book printed on paper and feeling the book, but….
Sometime around 2001 I discovered Project Gutenberg, then peer to peer networks, then IPAQ and Microsoft and Adobe Reader (which btw Adobe PDF reader on PDAs is a big no go), and then DRM.
Then around 2003 I start hearing about OpenOffice, hardware ebooks which were clumsy and very heavy on the eyes and then DRM again.
I acknowledge the fact that some way or another the authors of different books needs to make a leaving, but I am not sure if DRM is the way.
Now I am reading about all sort of Epaper prototypes which are not LCD based and are very easy on the eye. Also Open Document Format is a buzz word these days. A little less know than these two is a computer on a stick called gumstix . So, wouldn’t be nice that all these technologies come together and one company will go on the market with a decent ebook reader.
Even if we would have access to the Gutenberg library only and still would be a big step forward. And then when there are going to be a lot of ebooks readers like this maybe they will become a standard and the guys which are pushing DRM are going to have to change their strategy. Also maybe by that time we will be able to change the way society thinks about actually paying for a product (book) even if they can have that product (book) for free by offending the law.
So, below you have in no particular order some features of an ideal ebook reader:
- A5 shape or something similar
- Width around 10 mm
- Weight around 500 grams
- Epaper based color screen if possible. If not 256 greys will do. The screen needs to have at least 100dpi
- Brightness and contrast controls
- Touch screen based interface, maybe even allowing to write on the screen.
- At least 5 hours autonomy.
- one USB port (hub) included
- SD (miniSD) reader
- as few as possible physical buttons
- the software should be linux based (other open source OSes will do just fine)
- the software should be able to read TXT, ODT, PDF, JPG, BMP, PNG files
- needs support for sub pixel rendering (clear type feature). Not sure actually if Epaper screens needs this
- Need to be able to annotate, bookmark the book I read.
- I think the industry can do this kind of product for around 500 USD for a prototype and probably around 200 USD for mass production.
If you have something to add to these features please add your 2 cents, and who knows maybe sometime, someday this product will be available.
I wonder why most of the ebooks available from online stores are in english when the same books have translation in other languages in the paper format. But that’s another blog 
Update: I’ve just found what I think is the ideal ebook reader And I am laughing reading the specification as I write this update The product just launched.
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