Re: Here's another Adios - to film cameras
- From: Neon John <no@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 22 Jan 2006 18:59:01 -0500
On Sun, 22 Jan 2006 11:23:16 -0600, Bob Giddings <bobg@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
>A good summation, John. Add this to El Al's post, and we have an
>overview of the pros and cons. The best point, I think, is your
>comment that
>
>>The real revolution in books, something the big media hasn't detected
>>yet, since they report from press releases anymore, is the audio book.
>>Why the audio book is so revolutionary is that it allows one to "read"
>>when doing something else, previously impossible.
>
>I have invested close to a thousand dollars, over the years, in
>various hardware renditions of e-books - hiebook, ipaq, NEC
>Mobilepro - and none of them are as handy as a printed book,
>except in conditions where space and lighting conditions are
>peculiar. Such as aboard El Al's airplane.
Thanks. Growing up in a publishing family and still being involved in
publishing, this is an area that is intensely interesting to me. I'd
LOVE to be able to haul my entire library around with me the way I can
my music collection but I just don't see it in the forseeable future.
>
>One thing that you didn't mention: marginal notes. I do a LOT
>of scribbling and highlighting in the margin, and no electronic
>means of doing that is yet as easy and convenient as the old
>fashioned way. By the time I finish with a book, it may be
>useless and annoying for everyone else, but it has greatly
>increased value as a mnemonic device to me.
In my house growing up, marking in a book was verboten. That's what
notebooks were for. I still pretty much follow those guidelines. I
never got into the practice of book murder by yellow highlighter.
I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I just HATE to find a
good book at the used book store, only to open it up and find it
defaced with someone's indecipherable scribbling. OTOH, when someone
intelligent has neatly made notes in legible handwriting, sometimes
those provide much insight that the author did not.
In the electronic arena, both the full Acrobat (not just the reader)
and the LizardTech DJVU (a much superior format for scanned documents)
full package make adding notes easy. Just a keyboard stroke or two or
a right mouse click to insert a note. The nice part is that you can
minimize the notes whenever you like. While I don't mark up paper
books as a rule, I find that I use the note taking facility of Acrobat
a lot.
I think that this would be very very handy with a tablet PC where you
could click on an area of the document and then write your note
instead of typing. Especially nice with non-textural things such as
drawings, equations, etc.
>
>When you think about it, a printed book is a marvelous piece of
>technology. Sturdy, portable, doesn't need batteries, and with
>only reasonably benign neglect can outlast the language of the
>person using it.
>
>Hard to beat.
One of those few areas where Rev 1.0 was fully optimized. That
doesn't happen very often.
>
>But eventually I think we'll have a device, maybe like a pair of
>glasses, that combines pictures, audio, text, and telephone in a
>package that will be irresistible.
>
>And when that time comes, it'll be worth your life to get out on
>the road.
The killer app in other words. I sure hope so. I currently have many
gigabytes of books on this computer, mostly reference and engineering
texts and standards. This is indispensable when visiting a client
site to have a significant reference library at hand. Google Desktop
has made it even better. However, when I have a difficult problem to
work on, I still look for a printer. I've yet to figure out how to do
the e-book equivalent of laying out a couple dozen pages on a table
top for study and back-and-forth reference. Or how to prop my chin on
my fists and ponder down at a laptop screen waiting for understanding
to dawn like I can paper :-)
I sure wish Xerox would do something with its e-paper invention. The
one that has millions of little black and white static-sensitive balls
embedded in the surface. The paper is run through a "printer" that
flips the balls with static charges to produce black dots or white
space. The paper itself feels like real heavy paper. The idea is to
"print" a document, read it and then run the paper back through the
printer to print again. The paper itself contains no electronics and
so is dirt-cheap to make.
I saw a demo of this over 10 years ago. They had it set up to print
a mythical daily newspaper on demand. You read the paper, then put it
back in the printer, ready for the next day's paper. Seeing that gave
me a chubby that apparently was wasted. Xerox is the past master at
doing nothing with revolutionary technology they invent.
That would be the absolute best of both worlds. Use the massive
storage of electronic memory to hold the documents, then print them on
demand for reading.
John
---
John De Armond
See my website for my current email address
http://www.johngsbbq.com
Cleveland, Occupied TN
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.-Ralph Waldo Emerson
.
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