[stcredzero]

I think that the analogies between books and digital music will go much further. Books have, until recently, stubbornly stayed in the dead tree format and out of the digital realm. But to see the same synergy with digital technology that music has experienced, they need to go digital as well.

A big part of the problem has been media. Backlit LCD screens are fine for the "workstation" and watching video. But form factors have rarely approached the utility of the sketchbook, (paper) notebook, or scratchpad. The Newton made some inroads here. The high-end Wacom LCD tablets have as well.

To match the utility of paper, the form factors need to be light and thin, approaching the size and weight of a thin standard magazine. They should be always instantaneously available, so should remain on basically all the time. (We can give them 8 hours of charging time back at the desk, but they should still be usable all the while.) The ergonomics of input have to be excellent. If there's a stylus, the feel has to be as refined as the feel of pencils and pens on paper. Interactivity is a must, so long refresh times like with e-ink are unacceptable.

I'm waiting for the day when we can browse and remix our personal libraries with the same facility with which we can browse and remix our music libraries.

[zouhair]

You never been at #bookz or the multitude of ebooks on torrent trackers (text and audiobooks). A lot of people I know read those ebooks on PDAs and listen to them on their mp3 players

[stcredzero]

So then it's still at the early adopter stage. (An analogous point to just before Napster 0.1) When eBook readers (or whatever grows out of their technology) become as mainstream as iPods, we will have reached the point I'm thinking about. Tablet computing will finally have arrived. (Alan Kay's "Dynabook.")

Technology seeps into the culture only after decades and lots of false starts. (Alan Kay's "The Computer Revolution hasn't happened yet.")