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]

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.