Ray Kurzweil Vows To Right E-Reader Wrongs
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
It may be that content presentation issues are holding off more publishers from joining the fray, but the main beneficiaries of that would be textbook publishers, and right now many of them don't seem to be very enthusiastic about the e-book market at all.
Still, it will be interesting to see what happens.
[Edit in light of responses: I am not suggesting that people I know constitute a representative sample; but I haven't seen much real data either - I would be interested to know what the real issues are in the wider population]
For fiction, having my entire library with me all the time is useless, because that's just not how I read. I travel a lot, but only carry one or two books with me. That's enough.
It's been a long while since I was in school or university and read textbooks, but the value of having actual paper books that you can write your own notes and drawings in is very high.
For reference books, when I need them, I'm usually at a computer anyway, and why look in a single reference book when I can use the entire internet instead?
DRM? That's at the bottom of the list of drawbacks with e-books for me.
When it comes to DRM, I don't think it's a big issue, because,
- Non-tech people don't care about it.
- Tech people care deeply about it, but know how to get a pirated copy in case the DRM crashes on them.
"Always be accessible" is part of the umbrella of DRM-related concerns. This is exactly what I mean - people have adoption concerns related to issues fundamental to e-books (at least right now), rather than their formatting.
Approximately 1 in 4-5 Kindle books I consider buying I don't because of reviews that say something is seriously messed up with the presentation (pictures missing or improperly placed, chapter divisions completely gone, tables with data messed up or missing, etc.). If I have these problems with simple fiction and non-fiction, I imagine the problem is even worse for the examples he cites such as cookbooks, schoolbooks, travel guides, etc.
I didn't buy a kindle specifically because I didn't like the e-ink experience.
I will likely buy a tablet (undecided what OS as yet) for reading, and seeing as from a screen technology standpoint, the experience would is improved over e-ink, drm/format becomes an issue. But as long as the format is readable on multiple devices, I doubt I'd be too concerned.
When not making e-reader software and predicting man’s future, Mr. Kurzweil spends some time building automated financial trading systems for hedge funds through a company called FatKat.
It seems like everyone needs to build a bankruptcy engine at least once.
Simply put, for me the Kindle 2 is good enough in the software department, and perfect in the hardware department. All that is left is refinements.
I find myself shaking my head every time someone trumpets a new e-reader or e-reader software. I'm probably a minority in this, but in my opinion none of them get it; the most important part of the e-reader is that e-ink display.
Books that are not pure text and require images and formatting are a different beast, but I would argue that segment of the book industry can be best addressed with a Kindle DX-esque device and color e-ink, whenever that comes about. Of course, they will never be able to fix the most difficult part of reference books. A pure text book is usually read linearly, front to back. Reference books are flipped through, bookmarking pages with dog-ears and fingers. Text search is amazing, but it doesn't make up for that quick-scan, easily-navigated ability of reference books.
Maybe different strokes for different folks...
My Android has a pdf reader. It renders anything that fits within its memory constraints easily.
How is Kurzweil Handwaving, Inc. going to substantially improve on that? Scale it up to a nice sharp (PixelQi?) display, put it on a tablet -- presto.
I think its somewhat sad that Knuth solved this problem in 1978 and we're still dealing with terribly formatted web pages and ebooks over 30 years later.