For twenty years, the perfect e-book hardware has been 5 years away. We’re now down to waiting for a cheap enough, lower power enough paper-quality display.

Once we have cheap e-books, the medium by which we read will also be a medium by which can write and respond. Reading will cease being a solitary act and will become a social one. You can see this already with blogs.

So, I’ve been assuming that the e-book will mimic the form factor of books: display a page, maybe make a rustling sound as the page is turned. But it’s taking so long for e-books to arrive that they may skip book emulation entirely and be general purpose browsers/composers. They’ll work better for blogs than for books. And this may be the final nail in the coffin of books.

Maybe. (I’d write more, but I have to work on my book…:)

Categories: Uncategorized dw