I Want a Kindle Killer

lpress (707742) writes "Amazon's Kindle is a good e-reader and they've sold around 40 million units, but it is far from perfect. It could be significantly improved with speech recognition for commands and text entry, a well-designed database for marginal notes and annotations, and integration with laptop and desktop computers. Google, Apple and Microsoft all have device design and manufacturing experience as well as stores that sell books and other written material. A Kindle-killing e-reader would be low-hanging fruit for Apple, Google or Microsoft — think of the competition if they each built one!" Handwriting as an input method would be nice too; a friend in college had one of the experimental Windows XP tablet PCs, and it was great for note taking and document annotation.

I Fail to See ...

[ilparatzo]

I fail to see how the "features" discussed would make for a Kindle Killer. They sound like features that would cater to a niche of the population but little more than that. A Kindle Killer would need to find some sort of feature that when added to a book, makes it amazingly better. Not to mention, you've got to be able to do it for a price that makes it worthwhile.

If note taking in books was such a massively popular thing, we'd see more books with large margins for doing just that. Reading is a largely relaxing activity ... talking to your book to get it to do anything isn't likely to improve that.

What is being described here is more of a "goto E-reader" for research and/or students. Those aren't features I need when reading the latest novel. The notes or highlights I do take are minimal enough that I don't need anything too special, and certainly nothing that makes this the central aspect of my E-reader. Amazon did a pretty good job of understanding that people (the majority of readers at least) didn't want or need a ton of bells and whistles out of an e-reader. They needed something as similar to a book as possible. The book has been around for centuries and done a pretty good job, after all.

Re:Low hanging fruit but where's the juice?

[MightyMartian]

That's odd. Since in the last year I've read several novels, not to mention technical papers, essays and a few non-fiction books... all on my Nexus 7. Don't install much in the way of apps, and see no more ads on it than I do on my notebook or desktop.

Oh, I get it. You had this incredible attack against tablets, and you're not actually interested how they may be used on the ground. Do carry on with your biased and self-serving arguments.

Re:Missing the point

[glwtta]

Odd, I read a lot of non-Amazon content on my Kindle. Must be using it wrong...

Re:Kindle had some better features pre-touch.

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed, I want a paperwhite with the back/forward physical buttons. And that's all.

Re:The Nook is/was excellent

[BronsCon]

Just a quick google search turned this [meetearl.com] up as the first result. I'm sure there are others out there, if that doesn't meet your needs.