Todd Biske: Outside the Box

With the added attention on eReader’s with Amazon’s Kindle announcement, I thought I’d actually do a little bit of research and see if an eReader for sheet music actually exists. It turns out there is one, the MusicPad Pro Plus from Freehand Systems. Unfortunately, it costs $899, which seems horribly overpriced to me, especially for a device with only 192MB of memory. You could buy a cheap laptop for less than this. While it has a touch screen and some features that are specific to reading sheet music, it still doesn’t justify it costing 2-3 times that of the book eReaders from Amazon and Sony. While some professional musicians could afford this as shown in their case studies, it doesn’t work for the Sunday singer like me. I’ll at least keep an eye on it and hope the price comes down.