Saturday, January 07, 2006

New breed of e-books

Made possible with the advent of e-ink, we are likely to see several new gadgets of e-readers

Worth reading: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/
content/dec2005/tc20051229_155542.htm


I'm looking forward to the reader that is about the thickness of and moves like a glossy magazine page.

Think of what it would do for people who have vision problems reading? Sounds like a great advance.

3 comments:

Susan Payne said...

just a quick follow up. I read that the Sony e-reader may not be able to read PDF as stated in the Business Week article. Any body heard that?

Woodson said...

This is the technology that I've been waiting for for a decade and aa half.

The thin, flexible pages are good but I think one thing about books that people rely on withuot realizing it is the size of the book. There's a project called turn the page or turning the page. They have a display that mimicks a book in that you can see the edges of the pages accumulate on the left and decrease on the right as you read the book.

I think heft in general is a concept we loose in the online environment. I look at the card catalog I know something about how big the collection is. I look at the search page for a catalog and I got nothing.

Susan Payne said...

Yes, that heft would get lost is a great point I hadn't thought of.

Is the artifact of the book, just as important as the content? Or is the content more important?

There have been so many modes of passing written communication along. Clay tablets, scrolls, cave painting, to name a small few. The book is a relatively recent phenomenon. Perhaps the thin electronic book/page may be the next form we move to?

Probably comes down to the adoption of the technology and the economics of it involved.