A discussion at MobileRead about the reviews of the Entourage Edge brings up the unfairness of Engadget and Wired’s reviews of the Edge. This ending paragraph of a comment from Sarah11918 really stands out -
Just because this device might not appeal to the masses doesn’t mean it’s not well-suited to those who use it for its intended purposes.
It does have its flaws, like every piece of technology. But, it can be frustrating to see it labeled as flawed in general by people who don’t have a real use for it.
That’s exactly what’s been happening with eReaders – They are being labeled as flawed by people who don’t have a real use for eReaders.
The whole ‘it should do more than just read’ is the strangest argument ever – It’s called an electronic book reader. How could we make it any more obvious that it’s meant for reading books?
This post will argue that there is actually one functionality for eReaders, on top of reading, that makes sense – Writing. Especially if eReaders intend to replace paper.
We’ve always been able to write in books
That’s one of the amazing qualities of paper – You don’t just read what’s printed on it you also write on it. Paper has always been a dual-purpose thing.
If an electronic book reader aims to replace books it has to allow for notes and marking up and highlighting. It basically has to emulate paper’s ability to be written on. If it’s doing that it might as well go full out and add support for writing and replicate the two most important functions of paper.
Contrary to things like making phone calls and watching YouTube the ability to write is a natural fit for eReaders.
An eReader+eWriter is a better fit for work and school
Take something like the Entourage Edge – The ability to write and scribble and use it as a notebook (in addition to a book) makes it much more suited for both work and school.
The biggest feedback on the Kindle DX in the dx university trials was the difficult in taking notes. Here is some of the feedback -
I found it disappointing for use in class because I emphasize close work with the text, and that ideally requires students to mark up the text quite a bit,”
“It’s not very well designed for academic use, it’s not very helpful in page-turning or note taking, and the annotation software is very poor,”
“I think the only way the Kindle can become suitable for academics is if Amazon makes a specially designed device for use in the classroom that would allow easy and seamless annotation and notetaking.”
“It’s a fantastic personal pleasure-reading device, but textbook reading is different, ” Lazowska said. “You want to take notes, and Kindle needs some adaptation for that.”
No one’s talking about the lack of video or lack of email. They’re quite happy to get a device that lets them read textbooks and makes notes and mark-up textbooks and find pages easily.
It’s already begun to happen
The Entourage Edge, the Samsung E6, and the Plastic Logic Que all have eInk screens you can write on. The Sony Reader Touch Edition has been an eReader + eWriter since last year (although the implementation of the writing features is far from ideal).
The Samsung E6 has arguably the best writing capabilities thanks to its Wacom technology integration. For all practical purposes it is a full-blown ereader + ewriter and by coming in at $299 it puts a lot of pressure on Amazon, Sony, and B&N to add full-blown writing capabilities to their eReaders.
eReaders need to add writing to survive
eReaders have to be the best possible choice in their niches – books, textbooks, newspapers, work documents, travel, and other forms of reading. They also should be open to expanding into related niches – notebooks, diaries, work journals, cookbooks, and more.
If eReaders don’t have good writing capabilities – if it’s not easy to add notes and mark up text and scribble and illustrate – they’ll lose out to multiple purpose devices that let you read decently and write decently. That ‘decent’ reading and writing experience will beat a really good reading experience that’s hampered by poor note-taking capabilities.
If, on the other hand, ereaders add really good writing capabilities they will become indispensable for schools and colleges and work and improve the book reading experience of readers. They’ll also be able to occupy a lot of niches that paper does – Diaries, notebooks, and more. It really helps that they’re compact enough and light enough for people to use them for writing everywhere and for people to carry them around.
The Kindle DX University Trials have shown the path forward
They basically showed all the eReader companies that writing and taking notes and marking up text is absolutely critical. Without it hugely lucrative markets like textbooks and school are out of reach. If eReaders don’t get the school and college markets it becomes difficult for them to utilize economies of scale and raise profits to pump into Research & Development.
eReader companies also need to consider rival ePaper technologies – eInk hasn’t evolved fast enough. There’s no guarantee PVI/eInk’s technology will pick up its current snail’s pace. It’s been 2 years and 4 months since the Kindle was released and we still don’t have fully working touch. We don’t have flexible, unbreakable displays and the claims of color eInk by end of 2010 seem like a fairytale more suited to be a book on the Kindle 3/4 than its screen.
2010 is rapidly morphing from The Year of the eReader into The Year of Reckoning for eReaders. The Kindle App Store is a good positive step but if eReaders don’t add writing capabilities it might not matter.
Filed under: evolution Tagged: | ewriter, kindle ewriter
Bingo. Reading and writing is the key to me too. The Entourage Edge looks promising to me, though I am not clear that I can easily move book text across screens to a note file. The demo shows a user attaching a file to the book text, but not a similar operation in the other direction. Do you know?
John, not sure if moving things in the other direction works. That’s a really good idea.
Blank comment, just to get notified of followups by email.
hey, nice blog, i just discovered it recently.
I totally agree with you. Sometimes when i am reading in the Kindle, especially non-fiction, i have an urge to underline words, write things on the margins, it’s a basic part of learning, at least for me. And e-books would give you something paper books can’t: watching the page with your scribblings and doodles on or off, you wouldn’t be messing the thing forever, and you could make audio annotations, too. Lots of possibilities that way. I don’t think i would buy a Kindle 3 without writing capabilities.
Great article, and I completely agree about writing being an essential function to complement reading in the academic/education world. Thanks for including my words.
As I mentioned earlier in my post on MobileRead, I don’t read fiction. I read for information and need to take notes. If I do read fiction, it’s because my students are studying the work and I still need to take notes. My “casual poolside reading” requires me to take a book, a pencil and a notepad at the very least. I also take the laptop if I want to be able to look something up or need to be in communication while reading, but I’ll admit that my e-reader doesn’t have to fill that particular need.
A lot of reviews are trashing the edge because it’s heavy, but don’t acknowledge all the items (not the least of which are textbooks) that the edge is replacing. It’s a clear case of people wanting light and portable because they think lighter/smaller is always better (and forgetting that lighter/smaller is always in relation to something else, and the edge is probably lighter/smaller than what it is intended to replace).
There have been a few times I’ve wanted to reply to comments of, “It would be great if it were lighter for pick up and go travel, or reading on the subway,” with the response, “If your reading is done standing on the subway, are you really taking notes? Do you really want a 10 inch screen? Maybe instead of suggesting the device needs changing, find the reader that fits your use case.” Though I never even considered a Kindle (because I wasn’t interested without handwriting functions), I recognized that a Kindle serves a lot of people just fine and far be it from me to insist that there was something *wrong* with the Kindle, or that a typical fiction reader needs a lot of bells and whistles on his device.
As a former math instructor, where there’s an even greater need for writing on paper than in text-based subjects where you can type your notes, I couldn’t agree more that a device needs writing capabilities to really break into the educational market. The edge so far is turning out to be a pretty inexpensive tablet PC, and I hope we see more innovation in this area.
For starters, I think Kindle would do well to develop a prgram we can add to the present Kindle that would allow for more extensive and manageable text writing with the already built-in keyboard than the brief intra-text notes now possible.
Agree with you totally.