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

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

I think the main reason that microfilm never took off is that it's an awkward tool for pleasure reading--just as the desktop computer screen is. Siracusa is right that people will read lots off of screens, even desktop computer screens, but he elides that into being willing to read many, many pages of the same work, in a row, on a desktop computer screen. It's not an accident that his preferred e-book reader form-factor is the handheld (first the Palm, now the smartphone).

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've only read 1.5 books on the desktop computer screen; all the rest of the dozens or very low hundreds have been on PDAs and sometimes a phone. I even read books on first-generation Palm Pilots.