Relative Bandwagons
Posted on | April 12, 2008 at 7:35 pm | 8 Comments
Reportedly, publisher Penguin is now saying they are going to be releasing their books in ebook format as well as the regular paperly kind. I found out about this from this post, which amusingly mentions “the ebook bandwagon”.
When we were discussing this several months ago, I thought the whole ebook thing was essentially dead or relegated to a niche market, though I was wondering what effect Amazon’s Kindle would have on that market. Well, I guess it must be a positive effect. Sounds like it’s hard to keep those puppies in stock. Are they really that popular or is Amazon just trying to make it seem that way with their supply issues? Note that I still don’t have a Kindle – I’m still using the ebook reader on my PDA. I was kind of hoping that once third party applications start flooding onto the iPhone, that ebooks and an ebook reader will be one of the first things. It’s really easy to read stuff on the iPhone’s screen, especially with all the resizing you can do and the smoothness of the fonts and images. However, the battery life would be a killer, especially if you were on a trip. They’d have to figure out someway to not suck the battery dry. Heck, even my Palm T|X starts to run out of juice at the end of long plane flights if I’m using it to read the whole time.
(BTW, there’s another disadvantage to reading books on my PDA that I failed to mention in my original post on the subject. The PDA screen is hard to read outside, especially in sunlight. The iPhone is much better with this.)
Anyway, I’m glad to see that the whole ebook thing is gaining interest, and I’ll keep using the ebook reader in my PDA and buying books for it. (Although I’ve been using it less and less since I got the iPhone. The ability to easily peruse the Internet anywhere when I’m bored often beats out the ability to read a book anywhere.) But real books aren’t going away anytime soon. Feel free to jump on the bandwagon, but do it because you have a use for the technology, not because it’s cool.
I can’t believe I just said that.
Latre.
Comments
8 Responses to “Relative Bandwagons”
April 12th, 2008 @ 8:39 pm
A guy I know was showing off his Sony E-Reader. The display is ultra sharp and perfectly readable in super bright direct daylight.
April 12th, 2008 @ 9:46 pm
Not to be a Luddite, but does anyone else besides me think that we’re painting ourselves into a technological corner? I always used to think that if they ever did drop the bomb, the survivors (the ones in the small towns that just happened to be upwind of the cities and military installations) could sort of, you know, keep civilization alive in some small way. At least they’d have their small town libraries to look up some of the more important stuff, like, how to farm, how to build things like radios, general science; that sort of stuff.
But the very first thing an enemy does when he nukes you is detonate a high-altitude nuke so that your entire continent gets an EMP that will fry every piece of electronic equipment there is (except those that use vacuum tubes, which you don’t see a lot of these days). So once everyone gets rid of all those bulky paper books and replaces them with nice reliable digital media, a couple of nukes over each continent would destroy the entire collective knowledge of mankind. The survivors would have lots of shinny plastic discs that used to be readable by the broken machines, and you can’t make more machines to read them because the instructions on how to do so are on other shinny plastic discs. It would literally be back to the stone age.
And starting in 2009 we also don’t have to worry about any extra-terrestrials watching our TV shows anymore. Looking at an analog TV signal, it’s obvious how to display the picture. Looking at a digital TV signal, if you don’t already know how to decode it, you’ll never figure it out.
Of course, as soon as they come out with a truly lightweight, flexible, high contrast, and long battery life reader (a second generation Kindle) I’ll be first in line to buy one. I’ve already replaced a lot of my paper books by e-books and given the paper ones to, you guessed it, my local library.
April 12th, 2008 @ 10:36 pm
But the very first thing an enemy does when he nukes you is detonate a high-altitude nuke so that your entire continent gets an EMP that will fry every piece of electronic equipment there is
It won’t fry anything that’s adequately shielded. A PDA in, say, a metal briefcase would probably survive just fine. A metal building (quite common in industrial settings) may well shield most of its contents (except things plugged into external wiring, of course). The military EMP-proofs all sorts of things without much apparent difficulty.
April 12th, 2008 @ 11:59 pm
A guy I know was showing off his Sony E-Reader. The display is ultra sharp and perfectly readable in super bright direct daylight.
Yeah, I would hope that a machine dedicated to only reading ebooks would be like that. The problem with the PDA is that it’s such an all-in-one device that the ereader is just sort of second hand. I’m sure a lot of people would not like having to read a book on such a small (comparatively) low-rez screen.
April 13th, 2008 @ 12:00 am
But the very first thing an enemy does when he nukes you is detonate a high-altitude nuke so that your entire continent gets an EMP that will fry every piece of electronic equipment there is (except those that use vacuum tubes, which you don’t see a lot of these days).
Well at least we’d be able to still Rock Out with our old tube guitar amps.
April 13th, 2008 @ 5:39 am
I guess it boils down to what sort of time you’re trying to fill. For me, it’s driving time, and only podcasts will do the trick.
If I have free eyeballs there always seems to be other things for them to be doing. Except at night of course, but in that situation I don’t see the advantage of an e-Book when I have several hundred paper ones within arm’s reach of the bed.
So unless I violate Rogj’s guidelines and buy something because I think it’s cool, I’m not gonna be standing in line for a Kindle any time soon.
Besides, when are they gonna get around to making one of those eyeglass-displays work via Bluetooth or something so that your iPhone/Kindle/PSP can all use the best mobile display solution currently available?
April 13th, 2008 @ 11:36 pm
Well, I’ll have to disagree about the difficulty of protecting against a nuke generated EMP. I would say the military has significant difficulty protecting their equipment against it (for instance, they use fiber optic cables to connect fly-by-wire subsystems in their aircraft specifically to protect against EMP, and that cabling is *inside* a metal airplane. (As an interesting aside, just before the fall of the Soviet Union, some Soviet pilot defected and brought his shiny new MIG with him, and when the Pentagon folks took the MIG apart, they were stunned to find out that the Soviet’s s0lution to the EMP problem was that all the electronics, including the flight computers, were built from teeny tiny vacuum tubes.)
As one who used to design electronic equipment that couldn’t let much RF get out (for FCC compliance) I know just how hard that is, and unless your metal briefcase has been specifically designed to be EMP proof then I wouldn’t bet on it. Also, your metal building better not have any windows or air ducts to the outside. And Rog, while your tube amp might survive, I don’t know what you’re going to power it with. The power grid is one of the most vulnerable things to an EMP (because it’s so big). As I recall, one of the early A-Bomb tests knocked out the grid in Las Vegas, and that was what, a 40 Kiloton device? Imagine what a 200 *Megaton* device would do.
A 200 Megaton EMP is a truly nasty pulse that will find its way through the smallest openings and fry whatever’s inside. Law enforcement has been toying with EMP generators to stop high speed chases by frying the car’s electronics (and these are inside closed metal engine compartments). The only reason they haven’t deployed them is they’re worried about the collateral damage they’d cause to all the innocent bystander’s electronics. And these are little baby EMPs. It’s hard to overstate the power of a nuke generated EMP.
April 14th, 2008 @ 11:46 am
Well, I’ll have to disagree about the difficulty of protecting against a nuke generated EMP. … unless your metal briefcase has been specifically designed to be EMP proof then I wouldn’t bet on it. Also, your metal building better not have any windows or air ducts to the outside.
Fine, we’ll disagree. As you know, I’ve studied RF shielding too and have a little experience, though not as much as you. I’m not saying things like metal boxes and buildings will protect everything inside them — far from it. But I think a substantial number of devices would survive. Even a small fraction of a percent survival rate translates to millions of working devices.