One of the holy grail’s for book reader suppliers is to get their reader into schools and colleges to replace text books. It has been tried by Amazon with the Kindle but with limited success. A number of articles have pointed out that the experiments have had limited success for example http://www.switched.com/2010/05/14/colleges-test-kindle-go-back-to-real-books/
On reading a lot of these articles a common factor seems to be that students like to take notes in their text books and that is not easy to do with most of the current devices. The touch screen device form Sony comes close but having tried one its not easy to write clear notes as the recogniser sensitivity seems to be tuned more for touch control.
Enter Asus’s Eee Tablet – an odd name for an eBook reader but an appropriate one when you realise the probable target audience. Whilst a very adequate (although LCD based) eReader the critical part of this device is the incredibly sensitive digitiser which actually has a higher resolution than the screen. This means notes ahould be as easy to take as writing on paper. I think this may be a brekathrough device for colleges and schools. Being Asus it is likely to be releatively inexpensive, it has a nice design, reasonable battery life and it allows for open standard books.
Now I am not a fan of lcd for long term reading but for text books and note taking a good quality lcd screen should be perfectly adequate.
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