My Life on the Net

Sometimes I just don’t understand you two. You are both selling eBook readers to people in the US, and only the US? Did you do your fact-finding before trying to produce a product?

Sure, you’re one of the cheapest places to buy tech - but is it the best market. No offense to the yanks, but it would seem that the stereotype of the standard person of the States as someone who pigs out on junk food and watches T.V. twelve hours a day isn’t the perfect image to sell reading devices too.

However, the stereotype of the standard Briton, and more relatively English - is that of a person who owns too many of books and knows the entire collection of Shakespeare off by heart. So why no love? Even a Scottish person like me, although I don’t wear a kilt everyday (though that seems like it’d be kinda cool if we did) make some of the best literature in the world.

I remember playing about with various methods of reading eBooks when I was a lot more interested in reading. I hate carrying books around me but I always had a few things I carried with me each time I went out in my early teens. My iPod and my HP iPaq h1930 PDA. Each one is capable of reading text in a variety of methods, but nothing seemed to feel… right. The back-light was a major concern - I wanted to read books for more than a couple of hours - something I couldn’t do too well on a PDA - and I wanted to read them on a book-size-ish screen, something that seemed impossible in 2002 without some massive battery pack or an AC adaptor connected at all times - and I definitely wasn’t going to retrofit one of those Game Boy magnifying devices onto my iPod.

I doubt I’m the only one who would be at least interested in buying one of your readers. I almost bought a Sony Reader on my way back home from New York during the summer, something I wish I did now. I have full and free access to eBooks of quite a lot of the course books I need for the coming years, and the cost of the print versions of these textbooks are very comparable to the price of a Sony Reader or Amazon Kindle - so what would be better for me? Should I keep 10,000 pages of literature for my course taking up my so very limited space, or can I replace it with something that’s only half-an-inch thick?

You set your release dates soon, because I’m bored waiting.