With the advent of the amazingly cheap Txtr Beagle ereader, which will sell for about $13 (assuming it actually gets onto the market) a whole new range of possibilities opens up for ereaders and ebooks as gifts and promotional material.

When I wrote a post on this extraordinarily cheap and nifty German ereader the other day (link below), Vicki Tyley (an Australian author) wrote a comment in which she pointed out that this little ereader would be a great device for “give-aways” and other promotional purposes, given its price and size.

I have been thinking about what she said, and it seems to me that this little gadget is perfect for all manner of purposes apart from simply being a handy and highly portable ereader for reading our ebooks with.

Over the years since ereaders came along, people have often posited the notion that an ereader would be a superb method of giving people all manner of background information for forums, conferences and similar, but the unit price of most ereaders made this an impossible dream.  But this one has suddenly opened up these possibilities to us all.

One can imagine them being handed out at conferences, with all the various background papers loaded into them for the conference participants to bone up on the various topics to be discussed before-hand, or during the conference. Or companies using them at large trade fairs instead of all those bulky and expensive to produce paper brochures one always ends up with.   A use that I for one would be very happy to see, thinking of how often I have dragged hugely heavy carrier bags full of bumph around the various trade shows I have attended.   Just think, instead of kilos of shiny paper, one would simply have a pile of light (and reusable) Txtr Beagle ereaders to carry around.. Bliss.

In fact, once one starts to think about it, the number of ways in which such a cheap , but highly functional ereader could be used is almost unlimited.  As Vicki also pointed out, they could be used in schools for teachers to prepare all manner of information that the kids need for particular course in such a gadget, and issued to the kids for the duration of that particular educational unit..

So it seems to me that Txtr have not only produced an absurdly cheap but useful little ereader, but have opened up an unexpected flood gate of alternative and interesting uses for an ereader.   We shall see what uses people dream up for this small device over the next few months.

Link to previous post:  http://www.ebookanoid.com/Beagle

Share with us:

Can you think of any ways in which this ereader could be used for purposes other than simply reading ebooks with?  Do let us know them, and I shall certainly hand them on to the good folk at Txtr, as I am sure they would also be intrigued to see what alternative uses could be dreamed up for their Beagle.