Digital Pages - The New eBook Reader?
I just saw a recent entry on Dmitry Fadeev’s blog where he posted a design he made for an ebook reader. It mimics the classy Apple styling to great effect and looks like a sibling of the iPhone. If these product concept design was actually taken on by a company and implemented with a great looking screen and battery life as well as wireless functionality (Wi-fi or Bluetooth?) I’d defintely snap one up.
You may or may not remember that last year Sony unvieled their take on the eBook readerand Engadget.com went quite nuts for them at a $300-400 price tag. However this thing has no form factor and I’d much rather be seen holding Dmitrys concept. I’m a big fan of screens taking up the whole front side as opposed to being a window.
Another point to make is, I feel we should move on from the name “eBook”, it’s so Web 1.0…
Joking aside, seriously, what does “eBook” make you think of? Badly written affiliate-promoting spam PDFs are the main images floating around my head. A fresh name for the medium is required! Of course it’s in vogue to use “i” but the name “iBook” (no doubt already trademarked) will probably suffer the same fate as the lowly “e” and by the time Web 3.0 rolls around, prefixing words with today’s “i” will be passé too.
So ‘Digital Pages’ it is for now (shortened to ‘Di-Pa’, pronounced ‘dee-pah’). Or perhaps that’s going too far. I’ll leave on a high note and display the full sized concept in all it’s glory.
Yum.
September 30th, 2007 at 12:54 pm
Hey Myles, thanks for mentioning my post
iBook is an older Apple product, that preceded the MacBook. I think you are right, the term eBook suffers an image problem right now. There are a lot of cheap “eBooks” out there, mostly featuring secret formulas on getting rich in a week and all of that nonsense—I don’t think this helps the eBooks image. In-fact I don’t think there should be a term eBook at all. Well.. what are we going to call digital books then? Why not simply “book”? After all, we don’t listen to emusic on our iPods, we listen to music. In the future, we’re gonna be reading books on our iPages, not ebooks
September 30th, 2007 at 2:40 pm
Technology moves so fast, I had forgotten about the iBook!
I agree, we should just keep using the name “books” and avoid the need to label everything for the next generation.
Good observations!