Comments on: Google Book Search missing vital ingredient http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:/2007/01/24/google-book-search-missing-vital-ingredient/ Top Technology news Mon, 13 Feb 2012 11:40:13 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 By: William Woody http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:/2007/01/24/google-book-search-missing-vital-ingredient/comment-page-1/#comment-3657 William Woody Wed, 24 Jan 2007 23:28:38 +0000 http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:/2007/01/24/google-book-search-missing-vital-ingredient/#comment-3657 Where an electronic book such as the Sony eReader would really excel is with technical manuals and technical documents, where having access to a wide variety of material in a small formfactor outweighs the inconvenience of slow page turns or difficult to use navigation. In some fields (law, civil engineering, software development) you find yourself with huge bookshelves of reference material which is a pain in the neck to carry around. If that material can be reduced down to a compact device such as the Sony eReader, then you could potentially replace a huge volume of occassionally used (but indespensible) reference material with something that can be easily tossed into a backpack. If Google can translate a number of these technical manuals--and the reference to Google selling just a chapter tells me they're talking about reference materials and not fiction books--and put them in a formfactor that will fit on something like the Sony eReader, they may gain a huge technical audience. Where an electronic book such as the Sony eReader would really excel is with technical manuals and technical documents, where having access to a wide variety of material in a small formfactor outweighs the inconvenience of slow page turns or difficult to use navigation. In some fields (law, civil engineering, software development) you find yourself with huge bookshelves of reference material which is a pain in the neck to carry around. If that material can be reduced down to a compact device such as the Sony eReader, then you could potentially replace a huge volume of occassionally used (but indespensible) reference material with something that can be easily tossed into a backpack.

If Google can translate a number of these technical manuals–and the reference to Google selling just a chapter tells me they’re talking about reference materials and not fiction books–and put them in a formfactor that will fit on something like the Sony eReader, they may gain a huge technical audience.

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