Terry Blanton wrote:
> Wake me up when they make folding Kindles, right not I'm not interested,
> thanks.
Almost:
http://www.plasticlogic.com/
Yup. I have been hearing about this and others like it from time to
time. They hope to ship it this year. This is an 11 x 8.5" format. I
do not know whether the resolution and contrast are as good as
Kindle, or better, or what.
This may work as the printer replacement gadget I would like.
The Kindle has one huge advantage over this: it exists. It has been
shipped. "Actually exists" trumps "potentially better" in the
marketplace, although IBM used to squash competitors by circulating
rumors of "potentially better" stuff that never materialized.
E-book readers and the like will probably improve by leaps and bounds
in the coming years, as R&D money is poured into them. If only we
could get a similar torrent of money pouring into cold fusion! As I
said, it will not be long before all newspapers magazines and other
periodicals will be published exclusively in electronic format. It
makes no sense to distribute paper newspapers every morning to
millions of houses when you can distribute them electronically a
million times cheaper and faster. You seldom see such a clear example
of an obsolete, dead-man-walking business. It is like the slide-rule
business in 1975.
No doubt the Kindle will soon be available in a large format such as
this one. The people running Amazon.com are not fools and I am sure
they will allow owners of earlier models to transfer the books they
have downloaded to the newer model. They have already done this with
Version 2 Kindle. So, most of the money you invest on the gadget, for
the books themselves, will be protected. You only need new hardware
from time to time. This is no big deal. If the gadget lasts 2 years,
most people do not mind paying $0.50 a day for it.
I expect that 20 years from now a person with a Kindle Version 10 --
with color screen, 10" format, fold up and put-it-in-your-pocket --
will still be able to read books published for the Kindle 1.0.
Assuming Amazon.com is still in business this is a sure thing. There
is no technical reason why not. The books are written in plain HTML,
which I can safely predict will remain readable for thousands of
years to come. I expect future Kindles will also support Acrobat, but
there is no chance we will forget how to read HTML in the next 20 years.
- Jed
