Books for the 21st century
I like to read. Classic, dead tree version of books, that is. Although I’m a fan of new technology and hi-tech gadgets, I don’t think ebook readers like Amazon’s Kindle or Sony’s PRS 500 will ever be successful. It’s just not it. You can’t feel and smell the paper, flip the pages or, occasionally, use the book for thousands of different tasks then reading.
But there are minor annoyances with normal books. You can’t search fast. I don’t use a bookmark so I have hard time remembering where I stopped reading. I often want to write down a quote from the text and it is not as convenient as it would be with an ebook reader.
So why not combine the best of these two world? By embedding a cheap touch screen, memory chip and some other necessary HW into the book’s cover (so it wouldn’t work for paperbacks, pity), reader could search through the book, note interesting passages, bookmark where he ended and probably many more. Hopefully, because it would be produced in millions, it wouldn’t drastically affect the price of a single book.
Do you read this Amazon? Now go, design and produce it ;)
Yeah, like we need another thing to put batteries in… :)
How about dropping the book into tub while taking a bath? (As it happens to me all the time). Would the chip survive this? ;)