Why do I want an e-book reader at all?

[catsittingstill]

I've been thinking and reading quite a bit about e-books in general and e-books and the Kindle in particular.

One reaction I've been seeing on the net is "why would you want an e-book reader in the first place?  Books are cheap—why spend 300-400$ on a machine to read them?

I like to play D&D.  One of the challenges that you face sometimes is your character's ability to carry all the stuff that might be useful in an adventure.  This was a particular problem for my Bard character, who had a lot of books.  She had reference works on various situations she might come across while adventuring—books on wildlife in various areas, books on stonework, on architecture and engineering, on the exotic customs of faraway lands.  But she only had so much room in her backpack, and she wasn't particularly strong.

The magic item she dreamed of was not a sword, or a musical instrument, but a magic book that would display the pages of any book she owned, on command.  The regular books (pounds and pounds of them) could be left safely at home, and the magic book used to refer to them at any time.

She never got that magic book.  But I could.

I don't travel a lot, but twice in the last two years I have been stuck away from home for 24 hours with nothing to do and nothing to read, except what I brought with me, because my flight was canceled.  A magic book that could become any book I owned (or even just any e-book I owned) would be a wonderful thing to have in that situation.  And a magic book that was also a shining gate into a bookstore where I could buy new books would be even better.  

The magic book isn't for everyone.  It doesn't show color, it doesn't play movies, it doesn't send e-mail, it doesn't wash the windows, make dinner, or brush the cat.  But my Bard never wanted those things from a book, even a magic book.  And I think I can live without them too.

Comments

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Duh. Correct link. Still a pretty big dream, even if it's only your library. Hard to say, really, if people will be reading novels--or scientific "papers," as we now know them--in a 100 years. The forms did have beginnings; they might have ends.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I intend to read this in greater detail but my first thought is "wow, you can certainly tell when that was written by the gender language, can't you?"

Now and then I get irritated about pervasive implict assumptions that the default human being is male--it's interesting to read something that makes it so clear how much better things have become in that regard.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

You know, I had to go to wikipedia and look up "thermionic tube." Didn't have the vaguest idea what he was talking about.

It's a vacuum tube. As in, the thing they used before transistors.

People *have* been thinking about this for a long time, haven't they?

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

:-) One of the odd things about the history of computing is that almost everything we can do know was imagined almost from the beginning. A mixed blessing! Because it also means that we still don't know how to do what we didn't know how to do at the beginning, hence the failure of the project of AI.

V. Bush was quite sexist, wasn't he? But they all were, then, or almost all. Even the women. And his sexism probably blinded him to the social implications of the technology. Or maybe he was just very focused on science. He had quite an illustrious career; dean of engineering at MIT, and was largely responsible for the creation of the NSF.