After a couple of years of using this latest generation of ebook reader I find there is one core use case that remains under-served.
Never mind the fancy business models.
Never mind the rent-seeking.
Much of the time what I want is to simply dump articles, clippings and pages to the Reader for later, offline reading. I don’t want to fumble around with loading SD cards, custom applications, server uploads or postscript tweaking. Basically I just want to treat the reader like a printer.
Sure, there are various workarounds for this but none have the simplicity of just printing. And the support infrastructure already exists as the “print page” paradigm for web pages is well-established.
Naturally any implementation should handle necessary format conversions to assure the best possible rendering for the given device. Hardly exotic behavior for a printer driver.
Look, I like the “iPod of books” tag and the sync paradigm has its advantages but most of the time what I want is a paper replacement. An official printer driver should be included with every Sony Reader and Kindle.
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