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Archive for the 'eReaders' Category

the Kindle and the iPhone dance

Sunday, July 20th, 2008

Now that both the Kindle and the iPhone are out, it’s interesting to look at the very similar business strategy behind the two products.
I think most of the E-Ink ebook readers in the market are doomed to failure. They don’t do enough, and what they do, they do poorly. The world gave up [...]

ebooks and the iPhone

Monday, July 7th, 2008

I’ve been pondering the ebook situation with respect to the upcoming (Friday) launch of the iPhone App Store. One of the problems hardware devices like the Sony Reader and the Kindle have to contend with is competition with other reading platforms like the paperback book, or the library book. It’s hard to spend $300 on [...]

contra kindle

Tuesday, March 4th, 2008

Technology Review asked for my thoughts on Kindle. Here they are, slightly emended.
No one can doubt that digitization and the Internet together with various factors intrinsic to the publishing industry will radically transform the distribution of books: books can now be transmitted like e-mail directly from writer to reader eliminating nearly the entire traditional supply [...]

In the context of living

Sunday, February 24th, 2008

Through an announcement from the I-School at UC Berkeley, I was alerted to an essay in the online magazine Bidoun. The essay, by Binyavanga Wainaina, forces one to rethink and reconsider how technology might be truly transformative by placing the emphasis on how people actually live their lives, leveraging how information is already used [...]

Better pay attention to the Kindle

Tuesday, January 1st, 2008

I got my Kindle at the beginning of Christmas week. The holidays gave me a chance to show it to a number of friends and relatives who don’t read ebooks, don’t know about ebooks, and have never tried reading on a screen. Several of them had heard about the Kindle and were primed to see [...]

Toshiba says OLED production too expensive

Friday, December 14th, 2007

Those of us who hope for effective e-reading hardware (and don’t believe the Kindle or Sony Reader deliver on that) have been looking forward to an OLED-rich future, as it seems to be the technology that combines the fast full-color bright screens of backlit TFT LCD displays with the low-power low-weight flexible-substrate possibilities of the [...]