★ What's an E-Reader?
An e-reader, also called an e-book device or e-book reader, is an electronic device that displays books on a digital screen instead of on standard paper print, it is designed primarily for the purpose of reading digital books and periodicals to readers. Most of the e-readers using electronic ink technology to provide black and white texts which can be sized on the screen, and it also allows users to do storage, annotation, underline and bookmark.
E-reader is becoming one of the hottest topics in electronic industry, the world edigital market is swept by its agitation, manufacturers flocking to launch their on e-reader products. At present, major brands in e-reader market are Amazon's Kindle, Sony Readers and Barnes & Noble's Nook.
Consumers can usually purchase individual e-books at a price that is usually cheaper than the paper print version. E-books are typically purchased online through the internet, and then downloaded into an e-book reader for personal use. E-book distribution sometimes resembles a rental service, with consumers purchasing or using e-books on a subscription basis.
★ A Bevy of bottleneck Restrictions
☆ Technisch-Mangel
At present, most e-readers offer black-and-white resizable text presented on so-called e-ink rather than a LCD screen. However, when compared with a LCD screen, shortcomings of e-ink technology is obvious to see. The e-ink has no colored or video image options but to black-and white display, while a colored one can not formally crash to market. At the same time, it is too slow when doing page turning.
"Because it was difficult to take notes on the Kindle, because PDF documents could not be annotated or highlighted at all, and because it was hard to look at more than one document at once, the Kindle was occasionally a tool that was counter-productive to scholarship," as Princeton researchers wrote in a summary of their study.
Customers always see advertisement that e-ink do not hurt eyesight like a real paper book, but majority of modern people are stay at a shallow reading habit, duration of reading on LCD can not be enough long to make eyes discomfort.
☆ Copyright Restrictions
There are numerous e-readers available on the market but they all operate on the same basic principles and are still subject to basic technical restrictions.
The abundance of content resources is one of key factors ralating to the continuation of a e-reader's life cycle. E-book is much easier of copying and broadcasting, how to deal with the of content copyright is also a tough problem which influences e-reader's later development? The question is tough.
However, unauthorized publication of a copyrighted book through an e-reader can result in legal consequences, such as a copyright infringement claim.
Only the holder of a book copyright is authorized to reproduce or distribute the book, and must of which is master in the hands of publishers. Although Amazon backs it e-reader product with a large amount of e-book copyrights from publishers, the winner is never Amazon but the publisher. If one publisher conceive the idea to product an e-reader by it ownself, there will be a disater to manufacturers.
☆ Substitution Threat
Due to the reasons of low technicak content, low threshold and poor interation, an e-book reader can be easily replaced by any personal digital assistant capable of displaying text on a screen. Althouth without the advantages of an electronic ink display, the current tablets, smartphones, personal computers and MP4 are also capable of being an e-book reader.
Take ipad tablet as an example, one of its flexible features is that to provide a good experience on reading e-books. The Apple Inc. is specially made iBook online shop, providing download to multiple e-book contents. Besides, the iPad screen is a LCD panel rather than an electronic paper, which supports color display.
Media development must tend to humanization, which means it must close to patterns of human use. If a e-reader wants to make a rapid pregress in such a multimedia market at the time, it should meet the human needs to a large extend.
A ideal e-reader in future should not only continuely taking advantages of the e-reader devices of portability, readability of their screens in bright sunlight, and long battery life, but also be a perfect integration of text, entertainment, games, music and also Internet
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