So - eReaders. I think they are the coming thing, especially the Nook and sort of the iPad (not because it is a particularly good ereader, but because it can run ereader apps and also does a bajillion other things). I say "sort of" for the iPad because it's dead to me. When Mac comes out with a computer where I can draw on the screen in Photoshop and dump my drawings into Final Cut to animate them, then we'll talk.
Anyway, ereaders: In the interest of full disclosure, I work at Barnes and Noble, but even if I didn't I would think the Nook is better than the other readers, including Kindle. Sadly, Kindle is the next best one, but it's miles behind the Nook. This post isn't really about consumer information, but just a quick note - the Kindle uses a proprietary format so you have to get your ebooks from Amazon, and that is not and will never be the coming thing (that's not to say it won't become more common in the future, but that is not what makes something the coming thing. I also don't think it will be more common - I've heard Amazon is going to cave and start allowing epub on the kindle). Nook is open-source and uses epub and pdfs, so you can get books from every site except Amazon, including libraries for free. That is the coming thing.
As much as I like the Nook Color, I really think the new Nook, with the e-ink touchscreen is the best. What I like about it is how it seems very simple, and in fact it is, but only because it's very high tech.
When the Kindle came out, followed closely by the Nook, e-ink was pretty new, with a really slow refresh rate, and a longish black flash when you turned the page. The cool thing is, during that black flash, magnets are pushing ink around into little grids, like an etch-a-sketch, basically. Now the refresh rate is much faster, and the screen looks crisper and more contrasty. The old Nook had an e-ink reading screen on top and a touch screen on the bottom, and weighed about two ounces more than the kindle, which only has a keypad on the bottom. The touchscreen allowed for menus to be rearranged and added via software updates so people can get much more use out of the same hardware. It's a little awkward, however, to perform tasks such as highlighting passages using two different screens.
Then the Nook Color came out. It's really fun! It has a full web browser, and it has apps (don't start playing Angry Birds or Flight Control - they're like crack. Actually Angry Birds reminds me a bit of Super Artillery, an Apple II game I loved in my childhood). It has better reading software and tools because the whole screen is touch. It also weighs a pound and has only eight hours of battery life, unless you kill the battery faster playing Angry Birds. Still, at $249, it's one of the best Andriod Tablet values on the market. If I had the money I might get one just for Epicurious.
But, really, if I had the money, I'd get the new Nook and be glad I waited. It's the most advanced, since it's an e-ink touchscreen. They stacked them on top of each other, yet it's thinner than both other Nooks and weighs just under 8 ounces. This is because the new e-ink parts are so small and the touchscreen is infrared, rather than detecting the electricity in the salts on your skin. It uses so little battery that you go up to 2 months without charging it, and it has a much more consistent sensitivity than the color LCD touch screen.
Ereading is the coming thing, especially for people who like old or unusual books, or are poor. It is not for everyone, like people who feel the need to snort the musty fragrance of paper books. My response to them - buy the ebook of stuff you kinda like, and save your money for the hardcover of books you will treasure. It's like people who only buy DVDs and refuse to rent them. It's weird. I think e-reading is awesome. For example, I like to write in books, especially since I read nonfiction for fun. Some books, like the Summa Theologica, are too big and printed too small to write in. A double spaced version would be prohibitively massive and expensive. There is a beautifully formatted eBook of it for 99¢, and you can put as many notes as you want, highlight it different colors, and send your notes to your email or facebook (or to your friends). It even adds the notes to the book's table of contents so you can find them easily. That's why it's awesome.
e-ink is also the coming thing. I'm very impressed how fast they got it to be in a touch screen, and I can't wait until they have color e-ink. I hear they are working on it, but I imagine the refresh rate on all the colors you'd have to mix would be very very slow. Also, the screen is opaque, so you could not stack black, magenta, yellow and cyan screens on top of each other, which is basically how printing is done, as well as real Technicolor film. I love how it looks though, and I think it is more futuristic than backlit screens. Anybody can imagine how an LCD screen is to read on, having at some point stared at a computer screen for hours (it's not very nice), but having changing ink is very cool and new. It also shows that the companies thought about how people like to read, and what they might enjoy. The best thing about e-ink is that it is very human, and very easy on the eyes. Ereading is a pleasure, and that makes me feels good about the future, which is precisely what "The Coming Thing" is all about.
Is it unusual that watching other people geek out makes me as happy as when I geek out? Plus this has given me, oh, fifty ideas for SF stuff, which is where the Coming Thing comes in for me.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if it might be possible, rather than overlaying the color e-inks, to lay them next to each other and then somehow optically combine them, like with a prism. The color magenta, after all, doesn't actually exist; it's an optical overlay of red and purple (objectively they're on opposite ends of the spectrum—there isn't a color "between" them, like we usually think of magenta as being, because what's actually between them is orange, yellow, green, and blue).