e-Books Are an Interim Technology on the Way to e-Tablets

We must have a ton of paper in our house in the form of books. Some great literature, my wife’s degree materials, the libraries for my hobbies such as scuba diving and wine, a mountain of travel books and so on. Pulped trees are an enormously inefficient method to store and transport all this information. If it was transferred to silicon or to rotating memory I could carry the whole lot around in my pocket.

Which brings us to the current explosion in the use of electronic books. Most notably the Amazon Kindle (AMZN) (which holds 1,500 or 3,500 books) and the Sony Reader (SNE) (which can store up to 13,000 books). These devices rely upon ultra low energy electronics, especially in their “paper” displays which only use a tiny fraction of the power of a traditional LCD display. And they work just like books, the content is the same and it is presented in the same manner. So they are making the old fashioned books made from trees obsolete.

These electronic books are an interim technology. Soon we are moving, en masse, to having electronic tablet devices in our lives. These tablets are a combination of netbook and smartphone. They are “always on” devices and they are Swiss army knife devices, designed to do as many tasks as possible that we might need in our lives. Watch television or a movie, surf the interweb, do some office or school work, talk to a friend, shoot some video, listen to some music and so much more.

Electronic tablets are only possible because of the introduction of new OLED display technology that uses very little power and which puts the source of the display very near the front surface of the screen. So they can be made to work just like the “paper” in the current electronic books. So being a book reader will be yet another task that tablets will be used for.

Of course once people are using tablets for books, a whole new world of possibilities opens up. A revolution in fact. Books can become interactive, non linear and connected. In fact books can start to take on many of the characteristics of a video game. And this will inevitably happen, slowly at first, but the possibilities are too great for it not to. It is just more of the ongoing convergence between new media and old media. And what applies to books applies to magazines and newspapers too, in fact anything that was historically printed on pulped trees.

Comments

[rrtzmd:]

..."interim technology"???...wrong... readers are simply THAT technology...they are technology designed to do ONE specific job and do it VERY WELL...unlike, as in your analogy, a "Swiss army knife," which has a a bunch of tools, nearly ALL of which are practically USELESS...trying to add all that other JUNK to an ereader simply makes it more complex to use, more complex to build, more liable to break down due to hardware or software glirches, and increases its energy requirements...I wish someone would do a survey and actually monitor Ipod usage to see how much of the junk available on an Ipod people REALLY use...I'm almost willing to bet that 90% of the owners use it for nothing more than a cell phone 90% of the time...

Oct 08 08:56 AM

[Roger Knights:]

I hope they make a version of this tablet that is foldable, and hence pocketable. I could put up with a seam across the screen in exchange for that handiness.

Oct 08 10:42 AM

[RicD:]

Current ebook readers are high priced and have little or no appeal to Gen Y ... who, like it or not, represent the future market for books. We have five iPods/iPhones in the house; all are heavily used every day. While I personally prefer reading books on my dedicated reader, I do also read them on my iPod (convenient for waiting room/grocery line and similar short periods of reading). If my iPod had a larger screen, I would sell my dedicated reader. I like to move from a book to the Internet and back and I _expect_ future books to contain those sorts of links.

The "more complex to build" statement is erroneous -- these are not mechanical devices with many moving parts; they are solid-state devices which tend to be inherently reliable.


On Oct 08 08:56 AM rrtzmd wrote:

> ..."interim technology"???...wrong... readers are simply THAT technology...they
> are technology designed to do ONE specific job and do it VERY WELL...unlike,
> as in your analogy, a "Swiss army knife," which has a a bunch of
> tools, nearly ALL of which are practically USELESS...trying to add
> all that other JUNK to an ereader simply makes it more complex to
> use, more complex to build, more liable to break down due to hardware
> or software glirches, and increases its energy requirements...I wish
> someone would do a survey and actually monitor Ipod usage to see
> how much of the junk available on an Ipod people REALLY use...I'm
> almost willing to bet that 90% of the owners use it for nothing more
> than a cell phone 90% of the time...

Oct 08 12:48 PM

[Kelvin Teo:]

If I'm not worng Apple has launched the Ipod tablet so we're already heading that direction, however, I disagree about the ebook being interim technology. I do not see the need, as rrtzmd says, to have a
"swiss army knife" tablet. Just like i prefer to have an ipod and a phone seperately rather than the iphone, but that may be just personal preference.

I believe we are heading for a more advanced ebook reader for sure - larger screens for reading magazines, a4 sized pdfs, newspapers...etc, wireless connection (already here with the new Kindle), better application for reader to PC connectivity (same problem with ipod/iphone, why with wireless ability but still need wire conenction to sync).

Oct 08 09:43 PM

[rrtzmd:]

...ACK!!...well, you ARE wrong!!...there is NO Ipod tablet!!!...it has been RUMORED for over FIVE YEARS now and there is STILL NO IPOD TABLET!!!!!!


On Oct 08 09:43 PM Kelvin Teo wrote:

> If I'm not worng Apple has launched the Ipod tablet so we're already
> heading that direction, however, I disagree about the ebook being
> interim technology. I do not see the need, as rrtzmd says, to have
> a
> "swiss army knife" tablet. Just like i prefer to have an ipod and
> a phone seperately rather than the iphone, but that may be just personal
> preference.
>
> I believe we are heading for a more advanced ebook reader for sure
> - larger screens for reading magazines, a4 sized pdfs, newspapers...etc,
> wireless connection (already here with the new Kindle), better application
> for reader to PC connectivity (same problem with ipod/iphone, why
> with wireless ability but still need wire conenction to sync).

Oct 09 11:46 AM