I really enjoyed this video from Bonnier, a Swedish magazine publisher, demonstrating their vision for a magazine e-reader tablet. Bonnier’s design team at BERG concepted an interface that really compliments how we read both physical and digital material, choosing such elements like visual page markers that make you more aware of your position within the material and scrolling systems for navigation, made possible by a full touch screen. It looks promising for the next generation of e-readers, and I can’t imagine that the technology needed to materialize these ideas is far behind.

But Robert Andrews over at paidContent.org makes an excellent argument against e-readers, as enhanced as they will become:

“Personally, I’m not convinced any of these single-function gadgets – whether for books or magazines – will be particularly successful. iPhone has succeeded because it’s not a walled garden; ereaders need more than both books and magazines.

Apple and Microsoft are rumoured to be working on multi-functional devices – it’s here, if anywhere, that tablets may really come in to their own, as near-computers, not slabs that mimic individual olde worlde media.”

The problem with the dedicated e-reader is that it’s dedicated, and I personally can’t justify spending money on something that limited when an iPhone can do more for less. Engadget already reported that the Nook has been hacked to include a web browser and Pandora (as well as other apps) proving the desire for a device to be more than multiple books. The Apple tablet (or the Unicorn, as Kassia Krozser calls it) won’t save publishing, but it will convert many more people to e-books than e-readers can.