Anyone
who spent as much of his youth as I did reading
science fiction is familiar with the idea of the
"electronic book" - hand-held readers displaying
"printed" pages on flat screens. The idea is now
reality, as several manufacturers, including
AportisDoc, NuvoMedia, Librius, GlassBook, Rocket
eBook, SoftBook, and Everybook, has their own
versions of these displays ready, or almost ready,
for release. The idea is to download a book from the
Web and read it at your leisure on the proprietory
reader. I'm not shredding my library card just yet,
but it is an interesting development. Disadvantages
are the expense of the reader hardware, the expense
of each book download (currently around $20 a book),
hard-to-read displays, and reduced, not increased,
convenience. With the advent of universal open
standards that makes any e-book readable by any
reader, the market just took a turn for the better.
NetLibrary at
www.netlibrary.com/ has come up
with a way to make books available online while
retaining some controls over how they are
disseminated, to dissuade unlawful swapping. Things
are definitely coming together. Check out Stephen
King's experiments in Web-disseminated writing,
"Riding the Bullet" at
www.simonandschuster.com/
and "The Plant" at
www.stephenking.com/
(currently not available, but who knows if it may
appear again?). Whole libraries of e-books are
available at
etext.lib.virginia.edu/ and at
www.netlibrary.com/. For some e-book free-
and shareware listings, go to my
Shareware Word Processing and Text Documents
page.
Interesting bit: Xerox and E Ink are working on a
"digital newspaper" that displays information on a
tabletlike surface, linked into a Web source that
constantly feeds and updates information as it comes
available. We could see this appearing in portable
devices by the second half of the decade.
For a limited time, Barnes and Noble is
making classics available for free on their Web site
at ebooks.bn.com/ms_reader/special_features/free_ebooks.asp.
|
The Bleeding Edge - Sub Categories: |
|
|
