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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

… over the last couple of decades. Technical revolutions, societal revolutions, cultural revolutions. I gave a long talk at UIUC recently where I told the story of one of them, as context and contrast with current revolutions. The story itself is worth telling in this forum. It’s long, so sit back.

I want to first [...]

In an essay at Ars Technica, “Nobel winner blames cultural decline on ‘blogging and blugging’” Nate Anderson discusses the near-loathing that the esteemed SciFiction writer Doris Lessing pours out on Internet communications, generally speaking.
Lessing is quote as saying:
And just as we never once stopped to ask, How are we, our minds, going to change with [...]