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The Well-Suitedness of the Book

by Dead Beat on November 19, 2007

Dead Beat, as you know, has that old streak of engineering in him, and so has for years wondered how e-books or e-magazines or e-papers should work. About eight years ago he decided that it would require a flexible screen. Imagine the cover of a magazine - two sheets/four pages. Each page would be an individual screen which could download a single page of the book/mag/paper. In this way the reader could still turn pages, have the flexibility of paper, in other words the emotional expreience. Then he wondered would a single flexible sheet do: one leaf/two pages. Then he wondered would one page do AS LONG AS IT WAS FLEXIBLE.

So what’s with the flexible?

Well, he knows reading a newspaer off a screen while you are sitting at a desk is not a relaxing experience always. Nor is it necessary relaxing to read it from a laptop. Hence the flexibility. Well, like all Dead Beat’s great inventions (e.g. French Fry vending machine) someone else got up off their ar#e and created it.

But now let us add this into the frey:

Amazon.com , the world’s largest Web retailer, said Monday it will begin selling an electronic book reader with wireless access, the latest attempt to build consumer interest in portable reading devices.

Wireless access, based on the cellphone broadband technology EVDO, is built into the 10-ounce, thin white device. Downloading content does not require a computer and takes less than a minute for a full-length book. The $399 electronic book device will allow downloads of more than 90,000 book titles, blogs, magazines and newspapers.

“The question is, can you improve upon something as highly evolved and well-suited to its task as the book? And if so, how?,” Amazon.com Chief Executive Jeff Bezos said at a press conference in New York.

There it is. That’s Dead Beat’s point, thank you J.B.

The question is, can you improve upon something as highly evolved and well-suited to its task as the book?

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