Books are too charming and too sensuous to ever give up. Maybe people said the same thing about painting on cave walls, and I’m just revealing myself as a creature of my culture -- I dunno. But as useful as it is to read stuff on a screen, “curling up with a good PDA” just doesn’t have quite the ring to it that it should. I dream of a time when the visceral experience of reading a book merges with the practicality (and tree-saving-ness) of electronic books: In my fantasy world, people own one “book,” a gorgeous volume, beautifully bound, that’s comfortable and easy to hold, that you can take in the bath or into bed -- or up a tree -- with you. The pages of this “book” feel like paper, and you read by turning page after page, just like you do with a low-tech book of paper pages. But the pages in my fantasy book are rewritable -- you download text as you need it, and hopefully you could carry around your whole library in this one electronic volume. But even if a book could only hold one novel that’d get wiped out when you loaded the next one, it’d still be cool: your library at home could be stored on a single hard drive into which you plug your book when you need something new to read.
Anyway, it seems we’re one step closer to this dream of mine:
E Ink and LG.Phillips LCD have jointly announced that they have built a 10.1 inch flexible electronic paper display (which is a fancy term for a flexible LCD panel). The electronic paper display is scheduled to be shown at the FPD (Flat Panel Display) trade show in Japan in April 2006.
Highlights of this display include a thickness of 300 microns and is reported as flexible as construction paper. The 10.1 inch display has a resolution of 600x800 and a pixel density of 100 pixels per inch. Most LCD / CRT monitor displays have a pixel density of 72-96 PPI. The contrast ratio is at a low 10:1 and the display can show 4 levels of grey. While this seems low, it is more than adequate for reading in well lighted conditions. Keep in mind that most printed books are at 2 levels (black and white).
[from DevLib]
What other home-entertainment dreams do I have? Oh, I’m waiting for the end of the tyranny of the television-network schedule, which started getting chipped away at with the introduction of the VCR and is due for some more chipping. I want to be able to sit in front of my widescreen plasma TV (hey, if I’m gonna dream, I’m gonna dream big) and say, “Hey, TV, get me this week’s episode of Stargate: The Next Generation,” or “Hey, TV, get me the 1976 Doctor Who episode ‘The Brain of Morbius.’” I’ve been predicting to my friends that all television programs current and classc will be available on demand, probably at a small fee, within the next five years. This pronouncement has generally been scoffed at. Well, scoff no more:
Apple Computer and Walt Disney announced Wednesday that the new iPod would offer episodes of ABC's biggest hits, “Desperate Housewives” and “Lost,” as well as the new “Night Stalker” the day after they air. The episodes, along with installments of the Disney Channel's “That's So Raven” and “The Suite Life of Zack & Cody,” would cost $1.99 to download and could be played on the iPod's 2 1/2-inch screen, a computer or even on a standard TV.
[from SiliconValley.com]
A buck-ninety-nine is a little more than I was imagining, and who the hell wants to watch TV on an iPod, but it’s a start. TV as we know it is a relic of the past that we can do without. Books, we keep -- TV goes.
7 Comments
Leave a comment