A personal jet-pack for the 21st century

[james_davis_nicoll]

Shorter John Siracusa: e-books' coming domination of publishing is inevitable, do you hear me? Inevitable!

Nicked from Charles Stross, who pretty much would have to be more positive about e-books than I am.

Comments

[kayshapero]

Sigh... the "book reader" was one SF gadget I'd wanted since I was a kid. Finally it came along with the later Palm series (the ones with the high-def screens). As I've mentioned before, my TX not only stores lots of books, it fits in my pocket so I've got it WITH me when I want it. I'm just afraid the day will come when this is so obsoleted I can't get a new one or fix the old one, and with everything else the choice will be between "screen too small" (ex. Blackberry) and "device too big" (ex. Kindle). Meanwhile, the ebook publishers who will thrive will recognize that the ebook is the new "cheap edition", and the big advantage of cheap editions is in word one of the phrase. Baen recognizes this, and I've bought a LOT of books from them in consequence. Amazon will never sell me a Kindle (even if they shrink it) because they don't.

[(Anonymous)]

Funny how none before remarked that Kindle is simply very ugly and unwieldy. As for me, I need all the PDA functionality on my e-book reader, so for a while I stick to my PDA (HP ipaq)...

Ewa Pawelec, Poland

[kayshapero]

Agreed. Ugly I can live with. Unwieldy, no thanks. The TX is a PDA, which makes it all the better. :)