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

[n6tqs.livejournal.com]

I'm sold. I just wish I could get my "comfort" books, like the Nevil Shute and CS Forester books in a format I can read on my Palm.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

I'll get a Kindle when they fully support PDF. They'll probably have Neuro Twitter before that.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

And a decent screen size. 8½ × 11/A4 would be good.

[llennhoff.livejournal.com]

Siracusa suggests waiting for you to die.

[schizmatic.livejournal.com]

Agreed. If I could read and annotate my PDF's on a Kindle (or similar product), I'd buy one tomorrow.

Heck, if they can make computer screens of e-paper (or whatever they're calling it) that would also be wonderful. Seriously, I hate that reading PDF's or my own drafts is still staring at a light bulb.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Actuarial science suggests that I'll outlive him.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Ah, that article.

It's interesting how often people, especially older people, in SF books preferred old-fashioned books to whatever was currently popular in the invented world at the time. Almost like people getting book nostalgia before there were any alternatives to books. (I remember a particular instance in Heinlein's The Rolling Stones and have the general memory that it was fairly common.)

While I essentially never annotate a fiction book (I'm rather conditioned against writing in books), I can see why other people might consider it important. A service like Kindle could handle that, though you'd have to back up your annotations somehow in case the service died on you.

I'm not very happy with current e-book tech for reference material or textbooks; anything where page format conveys information, there are significant illustrations, or whatever.

Current e-book tech works very well for reading linear text streams for me, it's my preferred format at this point for fiction and some non-fiction.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

As a half-assed sort of "creative class" knowledge professional, I have over 10 gigs of PDFs. I'd love for there to be a way to read them at the gym or on the train, like an MP3 player. I read maybe low five figures of pages of text a month on a computer, and it sucks. But I'm not going to waste my time and money and living space printing out the damn things.

There are tens of millions of people in the U.S. who regularly use page display software of some sort for personal use. Why lock them out? I could see it for technical reasons, if eInk didn't scale up or something. (Which seems to be the problem for color display.) But it's a failure of ergonomic design to assume people only want to read something the size of a paperback.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

I'll be happy to get an e-book reader when it has the following characteristics:

1. The size of a paperback book, so I can shove it into my pocket.
2. Simple page access- as simple as flipping pages to the right spot.
3. Complete wireless connectivity
4. Ability to play movies and music
5. Phone connection and Bluetooth
6. All the secondary functions of a PDA or Blackberry.
7. Ability to read and write PDF files, wit the books of course being
in PDF format.
8. Complete web connectivity.

In other words, why the hell should I pay the money for a dedicated device, when I should be able to get all the functions I want. I'll be reasonable- I'll pass on the ability to squirt perfumed water at people, though a reasonably smart AI would be nice.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

HTC Mogul phone (mine's from Sprint) completely meets your list. I imagine many others do as well, notably the iPhone.

Though in fact I hate the contact and calendar apps, and don't use them.

I avoid books in PDF format, though; the readers for other formats are far better. My preference is HTML or RTF.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

Never solve a problem with hardware when software can do it.

By which I mean, my netbook, on which I am typing this, cost $450. It can read PDFs, e-documents, and Word files. It can hook up to Wi-Fi wherever it goes, and Wi-fi is getting cheaper. It can run any software I choose. 3 pounds, 10.2" screen. Its successors will be lighter, more powerful, and probably thinner. There's enormous competition in this market driving it to be cheap.

This generation of Kindle still has a niche market. However, the price curve on actual laptop PCs is headed through the floor, and smart software developers can provide more features than Amazon currently does.

We'll see. I'm betting the Ebook will ultimately be specialized software running on an ultraportable notebook that meets all your software/cloud computing needs. I think Amazon's DRM-based model is too late to the market. Apple got several good years out of DRM but ultimately had to go unprotected. I'm betting that the book market is good enough that the same will happen. (Note that Google Books is now offering the ability to read books online from their enormous database for pay, the money to be split with the copyright holder, and is hinting at offline access to come. They already have books specially formatted for the Android and iPhone, and out-of-copyright books are free.

With the smartphones chewing up from the bottom and the netbooks chewing down from the top, I don't see the Kindle or its revenue model lasting more than 5 years.

[mgedmin.livejournal.com]

Nokia N810 Internet Tablet only fails at 6 (no bundled PDA functionality, although there are some 3rd party apps I haven't tried) and 7 (no ability to write PDF files).

I have yet to see something better for book reading, (and I include paper books among the not-as-good alternatives).

[goingferal.livejournal.com]

I've heard the Iliad reader is excellent for PDFs--might be worth checking into for you.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Is there any actuarial science fiction?

I dimly recall a Superman newspaper strip in which the villain stole life expectancy from his victims.

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

You can read PDFs on the existing readers -- I read them on my Sony Reader all the time. I don't know how it stacks up compared to the Iliad, which another person suggested, but it does work. (The one obvious advantage of the Iliad with reference to your complaints is that it's larger.)

I don't think it's a failure of ergonomic design so much as trying to make an initial device that appeals to the largest number of people possible. A smaller-than-letter size device is MUCH more appealing for the majority of people for whom eReaders are useful. Eventually, one presumed that the market will open up to the point where more specialized devices for people whose needs aren't covered by the mass-market devices will happen. eInk can be scaled to larger sizes -- it's just a matter of needing to do what's best to grow the market first. I think the astoundly weird feature set of the Kindle 2 is good proof that we're still in the "figuring out what consumers want," phase of things.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

It's interesting how often people, especially older people, in SF books preferred old-fashioned books to whatever was currently popular in the invented world at the time. Almost like people getting book nostalgia before there were any alternatives to books.

That nostalgia stemmed from the microfilm revolution, which carried the same replacement-of-paper-books rhetoric we saw accompanying e-books.

A library in a shoebox. It was a tantalizing idea. See also "As We May Think."

(I often look at obscure technical government stuff. A lot of digitized documents today seem to be derived from microfilm copies. So microfilm served as a bridge to the e-book era in some ways.)

[pauldrye.livejournal.com]

Heinlein's "Life Line"?

[chrysostom476.livejournal.com]

Well, Heinlein's "Life-Line," pretty much.

[tomscud.livejournal.com]

Also, "Divided by Infinity", Robert Charles Wilson (I think).

Water ??

[nebogipfel.livejournal.com]

Also: is any of these e-books water-tight (I usually read when taking a bath)

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

Sadly, my Samsung Q1 UMPC is a near-miss on almost all the categories.

1. It's slightly smaller than a trade paperback.
2. It's a touch screen, so if the reader software supports quick jump and flip it can too.
3. Wi-fi and Bluetooth, plus its USB ports can support 3G modems.
4. Excellent media play, in widescreen and with Dolby support.
5. No telephony support at all, so it fails completely here.
6. It supports Office, as it's running Windows XP.
7. As it's running XP, writing PDF is easily supported.
8. As it's running XP, you have your choice of browsers.

Alas, it also runs afoul of the problem of price (near a grand, at least) and that it's out of production.

-- Steve got beguiled by the idea of a sub-kilogram laptop three years ago and shelled out... alas, the UMPC concept didn't spread too far and ended up mutating into the netbook.

[montoya.livejournal.com]

Acrobat is great as a reader on a TabletPC, if the content is sensibly sized. Full-screen mode, single button to flip pages back and forward, and clean attractive display.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Of course!

[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.

Re: Water ??

[kayshapero]

And what happens when you drop a paper book in the tub?