How many people actually read whole, full length ebooks sitting at their desktop? My guess is not many.

But we’re not not talking about desktops here. In the context of the original post, we are talking about netbooks optimized for e-book reading, which is the entire purpose of the Pixel Qi display.

How many people actually read whole, full length ebooks sitting at their desktop? My guess is not many.

Now, an ereader is not as critical as a system monitoring life support, but wouldn’t you really rather have critical (or even non-critical) systems running a more reliable OS like Unix or Linux.

Not if I want to be able to read encrypted MobiPocket e-books without illegally breaking the encryption. (Not that I particularly do, since I don’t buy in that format, but there will be others who bought those books in the past when they had something that read them and for whom being able to read them will factor heavily into their considerations as to what platform to buy in the future.) There’s no MobiPocket client for “Unix or Linux,” and there probably will never be.

Of course, since you’re on a Mac (for which there is no Mobi client either), you can’t read encrypted MobiPocket e-books without illegally breaking the encryption, so I guess you wouldn’t miss what you’ve never had.

The old Rocket eBook of mine got about 22 hours of reading at 40% backlight, with a Ni-MH battery. Ten years later it gets 18-20. So 40 hours does not seem unreasonable in eInk mode (relective mode). If the battery was the same size as the rather big battery in my Rocket I might expect 40 hours using the backlight. But of course the battery will not be anywhere near that size.

I wish I knew what these display panels will cost to manufacture once full scale production starts. You can buy a 19-21 inch LED monitor for $200 or less so that gives us some sort of upper limit. Still I think $75 is something to shoot for without knowing much about production costs.

The cool thing here is eReaders are suddenly blossoming with many units out or soon to be available. That is good. The pricing is still bad. But with the competition ramping up there should be pressure to drive the price down in the next few years.

Kind of puts into perspective Negroponte’s boast that XO2 will have 2 of these screens, with touch on both, plus power supply, motherboard, CPU, RAM, storage … for $75.

We have to hope that with scale the 3Qi screens will come down a lot farther, fast. Don’t know what the production cost of a typical netbook LCD screen is. But I’d imagine that some people would pay extra for the advertised ‘up to 40 hours battery life!’ that they might claim if you had the screen on epaper mode, and never turned the page!

There was a hospital that hooked up some kind of life support monitoring system to a Windows XP system. It was configured for automatic updates and it rebooted during the middle of an operation. The hospital SysAdmin then disabled automatic updates for all Windows systems in his network. And then came the malware from an unpatched system with a connection to the internet.

Now, an ereader is not as critical as a system monitoring life support, but wouldn’t you really rather have critical (or even non-critical) systems running a more reliable OS like Unix or Linux.

BTW, I’m on a Mac.

Outdated or not, Windows still has readers for more e-book formats than any other OS.

Every computer I have has Windoze because I need it to work; I wouldn’t purchase another OS.