Setting a couple of bookworms loose to play with the next generation e-readers is like setting Augustus Gloop loose in the Wonka Chocolate factory. The first thing that strikes you about the Nook is how much *faster* it is than the Kindle. And Janine loved the touchscreen. More video to come on Digital Family. [...more]
Setting a couple of bookworms loose to play with the next generation e-readers is like setting Augustus Gloop loose in the Wonka Chocolate factory.
The first thing that strikes you about the Nook is how much *faster* it is than the Kindle. And Janine loved the touchscreen. More video to come on Digital Family.
I still think that obsessing on the platform that the news comes across on is symptomatic of a severe case of Missing The Point. Let me say it again: viewing the newspaper crisis as being caused just because people don’t like buying paper anymore is akin to a 19th-century horse breeder thinking that people not [...] [...more]
But they don’t want to just be talked at. We want to talk to each other, connect to each other, and share things amongst ourselves without Big Media jamming their irrelevant messages in our faces. If that can take place in an old-school print product – as it does, among weekly newspapers, which are the one segment of the newspaper industry that is maintaining its numbers – then fine. Online, mobile, whatever – as long as it does the job that we want it to do, the People Formerly Known As The Audience will use it (and it might even attract some of that New Marketing money to support it).
Looking at the problem as something that can be solved by employing a magic doohickey is the worst kind of thinking. Like the cynical network president in “Scrooged” insisting on featuring mice on television, because the numbers are coming back that more people are leaving the TV for their pets to watch, and “we don’t want to miss out on this audience demographic.”
Hearst had been looking at flexible screens for its new e-paper, but Plastic Logic spokeswoman Betty Taylor told Crosscut that while her company’s wireless e-reader can operate on flexible material like plastic film or foil, Plastic Logic’s consumer testing shows readers prefer a more rigid display. Plastic Logic’s reader will be about a quarter inch thick and have a considerably larger screen than Amazon’s wireless e-reader, the Kindle. Both devices are wireless and use the same low-power, high-resolution E Ink display technology, which is partly owned by Hearst. While the Kindle shifts screens when users press the sides of the device, Plastic Logic’s screen will be touch sensitive, turning pages with a finger swipe across the screen.
I think that experimenting with e-delivery of a newspaper is certainly a good thing – insofar as the experiments also extend to making it possible for the users to have two-way conversations and to be able to share things amongst themselves that they find interesting and/or useful. Trying to maintain the top-down informational control systems of the traditional media on a new electronic platform will certainly be interesting, but ultimately doomed.
This is getting really, really close to the vision of the future that all the e-Ink dweebs have been yammering about for, oh, the last 40 years or so. The idea of an object that marries the (perceived) strengths of a newspaper with the electronic display have become something of an obsession for old-guard newspaper [...] [...more]
For now, check out this nifty little Kindle-a-like…
I particularly like how the display can now handle much better grayscale, and especially how you can use a stylus (finger?) to control the display, write your own notes, etc. The form factor of stuff welded to a hunk of plastic is obviously just a “placeholder,” so the ugly industrial look right now doesn’t bother me.
We’re still missing the part where we can roll the damn thing up and stick it in a backpack or back pocket … but, given the delicate liquid crystals in the display, that vision of what the display can/will be is most likely a mirage anyway. Also, I don’t think I’d recommend treating any of the rather toxic & corrosive battery technologies with such cavalier violence either.
And yeah, I know. Focusing in on a physical object that the news is delivered on is like a restaurant critic obsessing over the china pattern on the plate that the duck a l’orange is served on.
However. To extrapolate to the more trenchant issues in the newspaper industry – it’s more important to focus in on whether the duck is moldy, or the duck appears a day after you order it, or the other diners start pelting you with the green beans almondine while the waiter steals your wallet and screams in your ear about a real-estate opportunity… [Wow! I think I just waterboarded that metaphor! W00t! Yay me!]
While I love the idea of using one of these things to read the news, to have it in my pocket or carried around with my other junk, constantly updating me as to what’s going on … my fear is that newspapers & media companies will focus in on this as a possible magic solution to their problems. This isn’t because the people in charge are bad, or stupid, or any of the other calumnies flung their way by the increasingly smug digerati (and mea culpa, I have been guilty of that myself on occasion).
It’s because newspapers are run by corporations these days, and corporate guys look to concrete, hard solutions to problems that they can wrap their minds around. Problems with product distribution call for investment in shiny new trucks or routing equipment or big heavy steel cranes … things that you spend money on, that are built of metal and that have big engines in them that make the floor shake a little bit, and that make you feel like you spent your money on something substantial, something that has value.
In contrast, spending a buncha coin on a squishy, touchy-feely thing like “changing corporate culture,” or “re-imagining product possibilities,” or empowering entrepreneurial spirit” … well, a good example of this is the war in Iraq. Or the war on drugs.
We spend massive sums on technological, physical solutions to what is basically a mental & spiritual problem. We bomb the shit out of Fallujah, or build big radar dirigibles to patrol the border for cocaine smugglers, and wonder what it is that went wrong when the problem just morphs into some other face, and continues somewhere else, away from the heavy iron Death Machine we’ve constructed.
Because surfing the Internet is like drinking from a firehose, David LaFontaine braves the torrent to tell you what trends and technologies to gulp down, swirl in your mouth, or spit out.
It ain’t about the pony! 
