It seems we're now at Stage 3 in the e-book game, if the stages are something like this:-
Stage 1. Invention of the e-book (by Martin Woodhouse in 1988-1990. Received wisdom as that 'nobody will ever want to read from the screen so you're wasting your time.'
Stage 2. 2007-2009: Various other inventive people contribute to e-book development, but nobody's really interested except on the 'oh. that's clever' level. Received wisdom is that ' well, maybe people will actually read from the screen, but not yet by a long chalk.'
Stage 3. 2010-2011: Sudden reversal in received wisdom. 'Of course people will read books and magazines and newspapers off their screens, whoever doubted it for an instant?' Out here in the hard, hard world, a dozen or more candidates for The Book Reader Of The Future take to the field. Look, we're talking commercial, rather than laboratory hardware development here -- and the commercial world is, indeed, a hard, hard place.
Stage 4. 2012 onwards Shirts are lost, some of them pricey. But yes, people are reading stuff of screens of one sort and another, as we can tell from the world of advertising, and everybody and his uncle saw this coming, of course; obviously, electronic publishing is rapidly becoming the largest single commercial field of endeavour in the entire digital age, who could ever have thought anything else?
Out here, the battles being fought are now, largely: where is the reading material coming from and how is its creation going to be paid for? Who's going to get paid for authoring it and by whom, and from what revenue stream? (Probable answer, the way things seem to be going: from advertising, in the end . . .)
Stage 5. . . . and onward and upward. Everything settles down and the market is carved up by a few major players, and so forth.
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Now. The trouble is -- as we can already see, and foretell -- that several of the shirts lost will indeed be large in financial terms. Which of the e-paper technologies will prevail, and how much will be lost by the proprietors and backers of those which don't?
Are we going to see the $100 reader? The $50 reader?
And, over and above all this commercial jockeying:- Look, the coming of the e-book should be, exactly as Prof. Nicholas Negroponte saw, the source for the single largest philanthropic endeavour in, perhaps, the history of mankind. Children (and adults) in the poorest areas of the globe will have access to education. As Lao-Tzu put it:-
"Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man how to fish, and you feed him for life."
Well, now. One Laptop Per Child was a terrific idea, no doubt about it. But it has become bogged down in the mire of the same old competition for the nice little $200 Mk 1 lap-top and, quite apart from the errors made in marketing and distributing it, it was never going to reach the truly poor, the dwellers at the edges of the desert or the jungle or the slums -- simply because it needs batteries, which means (never mind the wind-up chargers) access to the socket on the wall, of which there are few in the jungle or the desert.
I believe everyone is looking in the wrong direction, and some are going to pay heavily for doing so.
The name of the game is not "a nice little $100 laptop with internet access, the ability to read the ubiquitous (and excellent for its own purpose) .pdf file, plus all the bells and whistles we can put into it, including video and interactivity and all that stuff."
It is, in my view: "Just how few machine instruction-cycles can we possibly use when turning a page in a book? That is, in taking a couple of kilobytes out of static memory and putting them onto a screen in the form of an illustrated page, in colour?"
And when it turns out that you can put sev eral hundred illustrated pages into a megabyte of memory and handle them with around 50Kb of book-reading software -- which is certainly the case -- the next question is:- "So, can we do this using solar power? No batteries? No wall sockets?"
To which the answer is: Yes, we can. But we have to give up the streaming video and the internet connection and (let's just whisper it) Windows . . . We need a book reader. A $10 device upon which to read books. That's it.
That is the way forward.
Don't you think?
Cheers,
Martin Woodhouse
