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

[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.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Actuarial science suggests that I'll outlive him.

[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.

[pauldrye.livejournal.com]

Heinlein's "Life Line"?

[tomscud.livejournal.com]

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

[chrysostom476.livejournal.com]

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

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Of course!

[heron61.livejournal.com]

The Plastic Logic ebook reader is coming out later this year or in early 2010, and will be just this size (and very thin)

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Hm. The mock-up looks sweet. The recent Wired article suggests that it's a 10.7 inch screen, which is still a little far from the 14 inch diagonal of 8½ × 11. Works out to be 58% of full size, a little small but maybe good enough. (Assuming it's not vaporware or at the wrong price point or too breaky or never gets a large enough user base or otherwise deficient.) But I'll definitely keep an eye out.

That second comment. I feel their pain.

[skapusniak.livejournal.com]

I think there's two different niches here.

PDF + A4/Letter (or possibly trade paperback if you're willing to shrink it a bit) sized device is what you need for the Textbook, Coffee-Table Book, Newspaper, Magazine, Scientific Paper (with diagrams), and Comic/Graphic Novel/RPG Handook markets. Ideally you want full colour for some of these. There's not really a great *technological* solution for this niche yet unless you're willing to go netbook.

However, for the novel, short story, just give me the million words your infeasibly long fanfic ma'am, and let me reflow your big wodge of continuous text to size of my screen markets, that would be an amazingly inconvenient device to have to lug around. And PDF sucks for this because things in PDF expect to have a fixed layout and be presented on fixed size page. For this market you really actually only need black and white. This is *technologically* solved, today now. Hell, Palm pretty much solved it back in the day. Today that's your iPhone or phone from another manufacturer of a similar form factor, and they'll throw in colour for free.

Probably due to me just not getting the book as fetish object hing, I don't really think 'black and white paperback novel OF THE FUTURE!' technologies such as e-ink are actually a real niche. Not really. You either want just the text because the text is really all there is to what your reading and you want it right now on the device you already have your pocket anywhere you happen to be, or you actually need the layout and graphics because the text *isn't* all there is to it and then you need something hefty enough to render the graphics and the layout real well.

However since the big problem is all publishing/pricing/marketing end of things, not the technologies, that's what the Kindle is trying to solve, unfortunately it tries to do it with a 'black and white paperback sized novel OF THE FUTURE'. Which I find intensely annoying, as it doesn't conform to my prejudices :)

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Tech boosters always do the market research on themselves first, and then the general market. Obviously Siracusa loves that type of technology, and just can't understand why the market can't get behind his love. And since this sort of product requires an economy of scale not to be orphaned, he's using all his powers of persuasion to convince a critical mass of people otherwise: by implying people are too slow for his cool, that skeptics should die first, that since people read a lot of text on screens for jobs they hate, they'll do it for pleasure at home, et cetera. Citing Cory Doctorow in support of an argument.

It might work for the Ars Technica readership. For genpop, though, I'm thinking not so much.

[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]

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.

[goingferal.livejournal.com]

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

[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.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

The Sony's closer to the ergonomic style I like, but the screen is still too small. I'm a block text at a glance reader, which admittedly is a tiny market, but I also read a lot of journal articles -- graphs, illustrations, formulas, tables -- which is a rather larger one.

I don't know what market research says about e-reader appeal, but people do read quite a bit of material in magazine sized format. I have a fair number of mass market paperbacks, but I don't actually like that size. The Vintage trade paperback size is pretty close to ideal for me. If I were a hardware guy, and eInk came in screen sizes greater than 10 inches diagonal, I'd homebrew something with a notebook sized screen and Adobe Reader style buttons.