Digital book readers will be hot gifts for the literary set this year, but one gadget expert thinks we haven’t even seen the eBook reader that will one day rule the digital book scene. Today’s guest on the Morning Media Menu was PC Mag Digital Network executive editor Dan Costa.
He gave us a sneak peek at his magazine’s end-of-year analysis of digital readers. Costa will revisit digital reading in a panel discussion at mediabistro.com’s upcoming eBook Summit.
Costa pondered the ideal digital book reader: “Long term, we’re going to need color. They are going to be multimedia devices. [Some readers] already play audio files in a kind of lame way. You’ve got to have video, you’ve got to have web access, and you’ve got to have access to the huge pools of content that are being published on the web everyday.”
He concluded by looking at the appeal of netbooks as reading devices: “I think a more full-featured device is going to take over. You can get a netbook for 300 these days–that’s the same price as an eBook reader and it’s got a color screen, plays video, and gets on the web. I think the form factor is going to catch up with it and you’ll see a sort of netbook-eBook reader hybrid.”