E Ink’s R&D guy sings the Kindle’s praises—plus a poet’s Kindle-love and K books at Manybooks.net and Fictionwise
“Before Gutenberg’s printing press, you had books hand-transcribed by monks,” says Michael McCreary, E Ink’s VP for research and advanced development, speaking out in the Boston Globe on the Kindle and related matters. “Now we have the future where you can wirelessly download any title in 60 seconds to a library in your hands.”
The TeleRead take—deep in our e-book nostalgia mode: I can remember when people thought that phone lines would be the only way to receive books. Supposedly it would always take hours and hours to download a War and Peace-length novel; forget about technological progress. I told the skeptics that the tech would eventually would improve, and it did. I also recall when certain publishing mavens couldn’t imagine reading e-books off anything but desktops. Believe me, displays are going to get much better, narrowing the gap between E and P. Despite the media hype, E Ink is still a long way from paper in contrast and some other important respects. (Via MobileRead.)
Related: The Kindle and the poet. A Yahoo 360 user named tomlinton, aka the Dead Beat Poet, loves his new Kindle and has been writing extensively about it in his blog, which ran the photo above. Great. I want to see more of this—E-loving newbies, especially people in their 60s and above, who could benefit immensely from the right kinds of e-books and gizmos to read them on. Ideally some of the new Kindle owners will read Isabelle Fetherston’s essay, on the immense potential of E for the elderly, and catch the e-book standards religion as well. With standards in place, the elderly and others will have a wider selection of books to enjoy and avoid the techno-horrors of the Tower of eBabel, all those clashing e-book formats, most of which will eventually vanish. Let’s make sure all those newly acquired books will still be readable years from now just like p-books. (Thanks, Beth.)
Getting Kindle-format books from non-Amazon sources: Check out the free Manybooks.net and the Fictionwise e-store for books in the Kindle format. The Manybooks.net service is experimental.
Vs. the OLPC XO laptop: Here, from Annie at Just write click.
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