Tech: The Future of Reading
This article describes the new device being spearheaded by Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos - the Kindle. Using a new form of screen technology that mimics a written page, the Kindle aims to replace traditional books by having better functionality - it's always connected to the Net, it can download new books wirelessly, and it can search and cross-reference stuff in the text. It sounds great.
Until you hit the $400 price tag for the darn thing.
The book has survived for so long (in an era when magazines, especially gaming magazines, are going under faster than the Hesperus) because it's essentially disposable information. It's popularity is not linked to ease of reading, or being able to curl up in a bed to read, or not using power - modern laptops solve pretty much all these issues already (how many people browse blogs and websites for hours at a time?).
What if you left your paperback copy of Charles Dickens' classic, "Great Expectations," on a plane? No big deal, just grab another $6 copy from a bookstore. Heck, what if you wanted to cut up the passages for use in an art project? No problem, it's only paper.
Until the e-book is almost as cheap as a real book, it's never going to be popular.
Until you hit the $400 price tag for the darn thing.
The book has survived for so long (in an era when magazines, especially gaming magazines, are going under faster than the Hesperus) because it's essentially disposable information. It's popularity is not linked to ease of reading, or being able to curl up in a bed to read, or not using power - modern laptops solve pretty much all these issues already (how many people browse blogs and websites for hours at a time?).
What if you left your paperback copy of Charles Dickens' classic, "Great Expectations," on a plane? No big deal, just grab another $6 copy from a bookstore. Heck, what if you wanted to cut up the passages for use in an art project? No problem, it's only paper.
Until the e-book is almost as cheap as a real book, it's never going to be popular.
posted by Mulliga @ 11:03 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
I am a great and fanatical supporter of the actual, physical, paperback book--even though I read text even faster on a screen. I have copies of most of my favorite classics as etext of some kind (thanks, project gutenburg)...but it's probably not REALLY one of my favorite books unless I have it in some kind of slim paperback version I can read on the bus. Plus, the ability to just toss books around is great--you can't handle your electronics that roughly. And I drop things constantly.
That said, if they could make this whole thing pretty cheap, so that after the initial cost I could get all my literature for free off the internet and carry it (carefully) around? I'd probably be for it.
/has bought the phantom of the opera something like five times [yes, i lose them/destroy them].
//ditto for Dracula
///and some Vonnegut books.
////Oh, Erik! <3 you're so dreamy. i mean spooky. i mean french.
[you know it's written by a Gaston *Leroux*, right? Right? Not that anyone cares what kind of references I'm making on my character sheet. I know, I know.]
Oh, and I have some Victorian poetry downloaded onto my TI 89. Yeah. I'm a fag. Because, you know, I need La Belle Dame Sans Merci while I'm taking a Stat test. Really.
You never know when Percy Bysshe Shelley will come in handy when you're working with Chebyshev's inequality.
"Ha! I scent life! ... in this probability distribution..."
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