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Paradigm Shift eReaders Head to CES with Color

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paradigmshift1Kat Hannaford at Gizmodo asks At what point does a supposed ereader become a tablet?” It’s a valid question on many levels. And with everyone expecting to see a slew of tablets and eBook readers at CES2010, you will be hard pressed to find one that can’t read eBooks using someone’s software to do so. For those not inclined to remember history, Tablet PCs in their early life all used Microsoft’s ebook reading platform out of the box. While that offered a decent experience, it was far from what we are seeing today, and with Amazon and its competitors aiming to have you get your eReading jollies from their respective stores, we’ll soon see every platform out there capable of reading eBooks.

But back to Kat’s question. It was prompted by the announcement that we’ll be seeing some eBook readers from a company called Paradigm Shift at CES2010. The supposed big news here, is that the devices will have full color screens and cost under $200. If you take a look at the specs, you’ll see the two readers (one 5 incher and one 7 incher) it might make you question the bold assertion hinted at by the company’s name, though. I mean if you’re going to call yourself Paradigm Shift, you better be prepared to do some paradigm shifting.

1 Comment

1 Comment

  1. feralboy

    12/30/2009 at 3:24 pm

    Wow, you really think Microsoft Reader sofrware is far from what we’re seeing today? I’ve been using the Kindle Reader software on my PC and I’m shocked at the things it’s doesn’t do that Microsoft Reader does well:

    – Resize images
    – Built-in dictionary
    – Page numbers rather than locations
    – Links in the index (TOC has links, but not in the index! Hello?)
    – Note-taking, highlighting, etc.
    – Ablitiy to flip through pages via a proportional page guide
    – Audio feature (yeah, I know it’s in the hardware version)

    The only thing I’ve found that Kindle does better is resize the font…it’s almost instantaneous, but I attribute that to the funky locations numbering scheme, rather than converting to a page number format that most of us are more used to.

    I realize a couple of these issuea are addressed in the hardware Kindle, and the current version of the PC software is still in beta, but really, no links on the index? No resizing of graphics? Don’t get me wrong, I love the Kindle’s selection, but if I had my choice I’d be using Reader or another, full-featured, modern ebook reader program. That said, with the enormous success of Kindle, I’m sure they’ll catch up to what we were using way back in the 90s (:

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