I ditched my tablet/Kindle as a book reader pretty much the moment I got back to Europe and shipping charges didn't seem like a major concern any more. They're cool, they have their place. They even have some advantages over real books. But dang it, they're not real books.
What would switch me back would be genuine e-paper. I want a wad of foldable e-ink screens I can flick through using my hands, with a ctrl+f search function, a dictionary, colour figures, and ABSOLUTELY NO DRM OF ANY KIND. Even then I'd still probably opt for actual books. I like having a library sufficient to make a small dent in the fabric of L-space. Or as John Waters so eloquently put it : “If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!”
The Reading Machine was a metal, handheld device featuring a magnifying lens for one eye and a shield to mask the other. Using photo-engraving techniques, Fiske miniaturized printed texts onto cards roughly six inches high by two inches wide, far too small for any standard press to produce or human eye to read. A user would insert the card into the machine and read it through the magnifying lens, moving both the card and the eyepiece to switch between several columns of print. It was a simple but elegant way of compressing any text into something pocket-sized. To demonstrate the idea to journalists, Fiske condensed the first volume of Mark Twain's Innocent Abroad (a book of roughly 93,000 words) into 13 of these cards.
https://www.engadget.com/2018/07/06/backlog-fiske-reading-machine/
How would you feel about a projection based system? It is integrated into smart glasses, and works best with paper that is painted with retroreflective silver. The pages of the "book" are blank except for page number codes in the corners. That way, the projection system knows what content to project onto each page...
ReplyDeleteI guess like other substitutes I wouldn't exactly have anything against it. I just have a hard time envisaging anything I opt to chose over a conventional book.
ReplyDeleteOne thing I have wondered about is a pure hololens-style AR system for academic papers. Printing them out feels wasteful and you don't get interactive content. Now if I could summon a virtual copy with multiple pages to flick through, that might be an acceptable substitute.
Dang, I remember a NASA image that I cannot seem to locate. It showed an astronaut in a mock-up of an Apollo or something, holding a tiny box that contained a miniature encyclopedia or library.
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