With all the iPad hype from the past week or so you would think that the E-Book market was dead. But I have thought of a niche for such things, and it’s one that even the iPad can’t fill. That of a personal printer replacement. My wife is a notorious printer user. Partly as she collects vast amounts of bits of paper in her researches, but she finds it easier to read printed paper rather than a computer screen. Hence our recent replacement of our old, broken, and much used printer with a new HP F4850 .
But what if an E-Book reader manufacture produced a ‘Printer’ dock that would allow the E-Book to act as a printer. You could ‘print’ your web research, documents, and any other output normally assigned to paper, to your chosen E-Book? Sounds like a solution to me. Readability without the cost of printer ink. Most E-Books support Postscript and PDF formats, so it’s unlikely that any special hardware would be required, just a dock that emulates a usb or WiFi printer.
Sounds like a project to me, anyone?
I’m looking for someone credible to declare passionately that they’re using the iPad to read several books a week. I think the thing has too many distractions to hold a reader’s attention.
I like it! It would be nice to have it all wrapped up in one little solution rather than doing something like using a PDF printer and saving the resultant file to the e-book reader.
Hmmm now that I think about it. Isn’t that a solution right there? Connect your e-reader via usb and “print” a PDF file to it’s memory banks (ha ha memory banks, I’m getting all retro here =P)?