What is your perfect e-book like? I’ve seen discussions on the ideal e-reader, but I never jumped in with my opinion. Frankly, I was too confused. One person would argue for a large readable display, while another wanted a shirt-pocket sized reader. And I agreed—I wanted a 12-inch screen that fit into my pocket. A backlit or reflective display? Yep, I wanted both. Make it cheap and add in annotation and wireless data. Whatever the tradeoff, I wanted both choices.
Then a few months ago I read about Firefox 3.0. It is designed to support offline web applications. For example, a Google document could be started online and finished when you were offline. The next time you log back into the web, the document would be automatically synced with the Google service. I began to wonder how this would play out in the e-book world and that is when this scenario occurred to me:
I purchase a new e-book and begin to read it on my large screen e-reader tablet. As I log off for the night, my tablet updates the web server with my progress through the book.
At lunchtime the next day I decide to read a few pages. I usually don’t carry my 12-inch e-reader tablet to work, but I can use my work desktop machine and I can log in where I left off.
Late that afternoon my wife calls. She reminds me to run over to the Motor Vehicle office. When I get there I find a line that’s about an hour long. Usually my iPhone screen feels too small for reading, but it’s much better than staring at the ceiling. So, I pull out my smartphone, log in and read a bit more.
On the way home, I use Bluetooth to connect my smartphone to my car speakers. With text-to-speech conversion I can listen to the book during my drive home.
The next day I have a business trip. I travel light, and I don’t need a tablet reader along with my smartphone and laptop. So I download my books to the laptop. This lets me read on the airplane and at the hotel.
When I get home for the weekend, I find out my kids have planned a couple hours at the beach. Since sand and delicate screens don’t mix, I choose paper. I print off 50 pages to take with me.
Back at home the Web server asks if I finished all 50 pages. Unfortunately, the answer is no. I managed about half before I was dragooned into sand castle building. I can update the server by typing in the last sentence I read.
The book I’ve been reading is a travel guide for Greece. As I go, I’ve been marking up and excerpting pages. Now I sit down to my computer and rearrange the excerpts. I interleave the travel guide pages with listings from hotels.com. I add in a few pages from Wikipedia, insert a few blog pages, and I have a travel itinerary.
That night my wife and I visit our friend’s house. These are the folks that will be joining us on our vacation to Greece. I use their media center computer to log in to the itinerary I created and display it on their HDTV. We discuss the trip, make a few changes, and we are ready to book the hotels.
I know the example is over the top. I’m sure there are many times that I’ll read an entire book on a single device. But, I don’t want to be limited to only one device. With a network-based e-book service I can use whatever is convenient at the time. As long as I’m not handcuffed by DRM limitations, no tradeoffs are required.
Detail: The brainstorming scene is just one from Flickr (CC-licensed photo), not from Michael’s school.
Technorati Tags: handhelds,mobile devices,mobile computing,Web-based computing,Web-based e-books,synchronizing e-books
I was just having similar thoughts yesterday. I don’t always have my ereader with me, but I do always have some sort of device that is capable of reading books (Treo 750, my hacked iPod Touch, Dell Axim PDA, etc.). It would be great if somehow I could have access to all of my books on each of these devices with my bookmarks still intact.
We do have a ton of users of TextAloud
http://www.nextup.com
who make their own audio books.