Steven V Johnson wrote:
Personally, I wanna eReader that
will display in full color and possesses the actual dimensions of a
typical periodical found in the magazine rack at Borders or Barns and
Nobel. And, oh yes, it's gotta be under a hundred bucks. I'm sure my
personal requirements are not that far off in the future.
The Kindle will meet these specifications soon, except for color. The
Kindle DX page size is about the same as the printable area in a 8.5"
x 11" sheet of paper. Tech writers are predicting the smaller Kindle
will be $99 this Christmas season. The e-ink costs about $60 but the
price is about to fall thanks to a new integrated chip. See:
<http://www.slate.com/id/2263787/>http://www.slate.com/id/2263787/
Personally, I do not have much use for color, and I prefer to trade
off color for higher resolution. The latest Kindle has better
contrast. If you have an older Kindle, you can migrate your
previously purchased books to it at no cost.
Of course, NOTHING will ever replace the traditional printed medium.
For that matter NOTHING will ever replace text cut into stone, or
Japanese written with a brush on rice paper. I am sure we will have
memorial text cut into stones on graves and government buildings far
into the future, but the medium is not widely used.
What in everyone's opinion should become the standard electronic
"Format". Will PDF files become the global standard for a so-called
universal eBook format, or do some here predict another obscure
electronic format will eventually take over. I'm extremely curious
about this issue because I, myself, have several, eBooks I'm
contemplating. I sure would prefer to focus my energies on making sure
I develop any future products with the de facto standard in mind.
Don't worry about that. Just be sure to preserve the original
document or image in the original format, with the original program
you used to create it, at the highest resolution. That way, you can
always convert it into whatever format emerges as the standard. The
big mistake is to throw away original source material and preserve a
derivative format or medium, such as a low-res Acrobat file or
(shudder!) a printed copy only. That is the mistake that many cold
fusion authors and publishers have made, which cost me a year of my
life devoted to converting documents from printed text to an
electronic copy, inferior to the original electronic copy.
Do not depend on Acrobat. An Acrobat document is missing a lot of
information available in the original word processor file, graphs,
photos and other objects assembled in the document. Graphs and images
are usually compressed with a lossy technique. (Several different
techniques are available but none of them works well.)
In the 1970s there was a lot of hand-wringing because computer data
was lost when the programs used to create it was lost, the format
become obsolete, or the physical medium become obsolete (media such
as paper tape or 8" floppy disks). I do not think this will be a
problem with today's documents and images 50 to 100 years from now.
As long as the files are created with widely used programs such as
Microsoft Word or WordPerfect I am confident that future programs
will be able to read them. I say this because there are billions
(possibly trillions?) of documents and images in these formats, so
the need to convert them will remain for many decades to come. Prior
to 1970, there were probably only a few terabytes of information in
machine readable format that was worth preserving or that anyone
would want to access. Most computer data was transient commercial
information such as invoices. And that data was in many different
incompatible formats. So it was harder to convert old data to new
formats, and it wasn't worth the effort.
Another reason formats such as Microsoft Word, PDF, JPG, TIF or ZIP
will remain readable is that the methods of decoding these formats
are completely automated and in the public domain. Any program
development suite will include tools to handle these formats. I think
it is extremely unlikely such widespread program code will be
completely lost in the next 50 years. Many common algorithms and
standards from 1960, such as ASCII and COBOL, are completely viable
today. Heck, there are still tools to convert EBCDIC, and I'll bet
they will be with us 100 years from now.
There are so many JPG images out there, my guess is that computers
will be able to read and convert them to a more modern standard
thousands of years from now.
- Jed
