On Sun, Mar 01, 2009 at 09:54:03AM -0000, Bob W scripsit:
> That last sentence is completely vacuous. 'Bringing the benefits...'.
> Alright, what are they?
Well, there's:
- annotation (including bookmarks that can't fall out)
- search (where was? is this a Shakespeare quote?)
- ease of purchase (anywhere with a net connection),
- speed of distribution (Hot New Book becomes available; three
minutes later, you have a copy, potentially *automatically* you
have a copy; consider what fraction of Harry Potter fans would have
turned that down for books six and seven...)
- variability of presentation (what's _your_ favourite font, font
size, leading, and initial capital style?)
- ancillary material, including hypertext (a zoomable Baggins family
tree with hot links, say, or the essays on where Forrester
departed from actual history; because the printing cost is close to
fixed, extra material doesn't cost more paper, so it becomes a way to
attract readers, rather than an expense to be ruthlessly
suppressed.)
- compactness (reader with one book and reader with one thousand
books is the same size thing to carry)
- lightness (current "out soon" reader designs are around 200
grammes. They stay that size even when the content includes massive
reference tomes for work, the complete works of William Shakespeare,
all 22 Aubrey and Maturin novels, and what would have been four shelf
feet of penny dreadfuls courtesy of Project Gutenberg.)
- backups; if the heavily annotated professional copy of something
gets lost with your luggage, you still have it because the backup
didn't travel.
- cost per book *ought* to be a benefit, too (the material costs
drop by an order of magnitude), but I wouldn't bet on seeing that
one quickly.
- paper is better than screens right now for shipped devices,
legibility wise; that's not true for the lab bench stuff, so it
won't be true for shipped devices in five years or so at the
outside.
There remains nothing at all that says you can't get a tactilely
pleasant leather cover for the ebook reader, either.
-- Graydon
--
PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List
PDML@pdml.net
http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow
the directions.
