November 11, 2008

eReaders for the enterprise?

original Post from February 25th 2008.

A Computerworld article (here) entitled "Are enterprises ready for e-readers?" explores some early adoption of eReaders by enterprises. Unsurprisingly, the early adopters explored are Publishing houses using the Amazon Kindle.

I wonder if a better question wouldn't have been "Are eReaders ready for the Enterprise?".
It seems connectivity, client software, enterprise IT services, formats, etc could be adapted to make eReaders (more?) suitable for enterprise applications.

I can see the utility of a one-hand-held, daylight visible display, eReader able to carry anywhere HUGE amounts of content that can be updated transparently as interesting for a bunch of enterprise applications without even talking about "general office productivity" and meetings etc. Examples that occur to me include lawyers (need to be up to date on huge volumes of written data), medical practitioners (similar to lawyers in volume and diversity of material they are expected to be up to date on and may need to consult), service employees and repair men (huge variety of huge repair manuals), sales men (CRM data), etc.

What about a door-to-door e-Encyclopedia salesman? Just joking! :-)

How would you use an eReader in your job?

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