Although I have used Kindle ereaders since getting my first Kindle about a decade ago, I've been keeping an eye on other brands, especially Kobo, who have been much more innovative than Amazon. Now they've stolen a big jump on Amazon, by introducing the Kobo Elipsa, a 10.3" reader with pen support.
They're not the first to market a large-format e-ink device, but they're the first major player in the reader field to do so. The Elipsa comes with a pen and you can use it to take notes or annotate documents, including ebooks and PDFs. It'll be available June 24th with a stylus and sleep cover for $499.99 Canadian. (US pricing should be about $399).
I've been wanting a bigger ereader for quite a while. Because of my vision problems, I read pretty much exclusively on my Kindle or Samsung tablet. Using a large font size (14 or 18 points) means that I don't get a lot of text on a screen, so having a 10" screen would make reading books much easier.
Incidentally, I'm quite aware that I'm not the target market for this. Kobo seems to be aiming it at professionals who need to edit or annotate documents. (They should target technical writers!) I'd have killed to have it when I was working at the TSX, but I don't have much use for the editing features now that I'm retired.
It will be interesting to see if this drives Amazon to finally make a major upgrade to their Kindle line, which has been getting a bit long in the tooth over the last few years.
I will definitely be visiting a Chapters store later this summer to have a look at it.
No comments:
Post a Comment