Anonymous Patron writes “E-paper is one for the books Sony and Matsushita, the two largest consumer electronic companies, now claim to have turned the corner in driving the humble book to extinction.
The two rivals have begun selling their versions of the electronic book.
They have come up with a handheld gizmo that reads, if you are prepared to part with $490, like a book.”
Daniel Adds: No word on whether the two devices are compatible with one another, but one claims to let you read 10,000 pages and the other is supposed to let you read 8,000 pages on one set of triple A batteries.
Arrrgh!
It’s commentary like this that makes an unneccesary dichotomy between print and e-text, and makes so many book lovers feel like they have to circle the wagons. Jeeze! I’d do anything to have a decent e-reader for the Bill Clinton biography. There’s nothing wonderful about trying to read a 1000 page book in bed.
Re:Arrrgh!
Or when you have a schmuck like me who typically has six or so books going at a time. I’d like to be able to actually carry them all around with me so I can read whatever I’m in the mood for. Instead I have to pick and choose and, usually, wind up leaving home the book I want to read later in the day.
Print is print, period. This sentence is print, it’s just not on a page. And thus, this sentence and the ones preceeding it, weigh nothing. I’d love to have something that weighed a few grams but carries forty pounds of books.
Re:Arrrgh!
And thus, this sentence and the ones preceeding it, weigh nothing.
Your sensentce got stuck in my seventeen inch monitor so it weighs around 35 pounds.
Trips and ebooks
I concur with the sentiment that it would be good to be able to carry several books at once while traveling. On Thursday I am taking a sixteen hour plane flight and have three books that I would like to take but cannot spare the weight. I considered taking my Palm Pilot that allows me to carry several books but it has a built in battery so I cannot just swap batteries. Even if it did have batteries I would have to carry extras.
It is a great idea to be able to read 8,000-10,000 pages before a battery change is needed.
Now that there are ebook readers with screens that compete with paper, librarians and our library associations need to push for an open source ebook reader. A reader that will allow you to read content from any publisher you choose.
Could be a boon to students everywhere
IF this is the real thing this time around, and IF we’re not stuck with nontransferable, proprietary formats, think of what e-paper readers could do for our schools and colleges.
Huge, injury producing, backpacks reduced to a lightweight book reader with a semester’s worth a books and a paper notebook. Or a PDA if you must. That would have been a dream in college.
On the other hand, I enjoyed my college textbooks so much that I kept them after I left college. I can see DRM arrangements being made that your textbooks self-destructed after you were no longer enrolled in the class.
I still want to see one of these devices before I lavish any praise on them.
… and a boon to knowledge workers
Yes, a boon to students, and great for holiday reading. But also great for us knowledge workers. Like many, I attend lots of meetings, and commonly see people attending those meetings with big binders full of documents from previous meetings. And despite the size of their binders, someone always seems to lack some vital document. Wouldn’t it be great if we could all carry all our documents around with us to meetings?
But … how is this better than a laptop? I guess the battery life thing is good. Laptops always seem to “die” before a meeting is out. And mine is too dim to read off without mains power. So maybe this will be a killer device. I’d still rather have a tablet PC, but … the price makes this attractive. So if someone wants to give me one to road test, I’m willing!
I do object to the statement “even the most die-hard geek will admit that back-lit liquid crystal screens are a strain on the eye”. I have been working all morning on a laptop with backlit LCD screen (on mains power!) and haven’t noticed any eye strain. This is one of those things which used to be true and no longer is, due to improvements in technology.
What the heck?
Your seventeen inch monitor only weighs 35 pounds? Dude! How? I’ve got a 19 inch at home that has to weight in at around 50 pounds.
No joke. I gotta flat panel last weekend and when I took the 19 inch CRT off the table, the table actually groaned with the release of the weight. I’ve never heard a table sigh. Now it’s sitting on the floor under the table hooked up to my Linux box.
Re:Could be a boon to students everywhere
As far as proprietary formats go, there’s three things I want in an e-book reader: HTML, ASCII, and PDF. All of these are platform independent, they deliver text well. You can search ASCII really easily, you can use hyperlinking and pictures in HTML with no problems, and when you really need all the goodies, nothing compares to a PDF of the original. Especially so if the PDF has all the whistles and bells like bookmarks, searchability, etc.
I see no reason to reinvent the wheel and even less reason to reinvent the book. When people want to read, they want very little. All they need is print large enough to read comfortably, all of which could be handled with software on the reader. Even in the modern age of computers, web sites and documents look pretty much like magazine layouts. There’s been no huge change other than the ability to search easily and the method of delivery.