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

[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.)

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Interesting; the "microfilm revolution" seemed to be imminent in the sixties, and in the seventies, and then somewhere around there people realized they'd been lied to about the archival properties of microfilm. So from my point of view, it never really happened. Certain archival materials were mostly available on microfilm, and everybody agreed it was a horrible pain to work with :-).

[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.