Ebooks on the way?
November 19th, 2007 by David Weinberger
I just published a new issue of my free newsletter. The main article is, entirely by coincidence, about ebooks and libraries — a coincidence because Amazon just announced Kindle, its ebook hardware.
The main article is a response to Anthony Grafton’s recent article in the New Yorker that tries to de-hype claims about the future of libraries.
By the way, Everything Is Miscellaneous is available for Kindle.
Also by the way, I just got a link from Urs Gasser to a recent conference on the future of books.
The OLPC XO laptop looks like a great e-book!
It’s certainly not pocket-sized (not even as pretend-pocket-sized as the Kindle), but has a 7.5″ screen which is daylight readable and 200dpi.
Apropos: a little thing at OLPCnews.com on this same topic, featuring a video of Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive extolling the OLPC’s big advantage to them — high res means they can pretty much scan-and-forget to make new e-books:
http://www.olpcnews.com/content/ebooks/internet_archive_laptop_ebook.html
(Direct working link to youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpXplMK7OQA)
Cheers,
timothy