Put on goggles to read naughty e-books?
Oh, wicked readers, we know an allure of PDAs and cellphones and other small-screened devices—the chance to read junky novels during lunch breaks without bosses and colleagues being any wiser. Emma Bovary as a girl would have loved a PDA. A Palm TX would have been just right for those naughty romance novels that the linen maid brought her at the convent.
But what if you hate small screens? Might one solution be goggles? Large-screen emulators, so to speak? Suppose they could even work with special prescription lenses for those with vision problems. Which leads me to the topic of this post.
Among the hot products at the Consumer Electronic Show this year is the Myvu line of goggles for certain iPods, Sansa players, DVD players and other devices—movie watching is the main app. Prices are said to be as low as $199 and dropping in the near future. And remember, you can read read e-books off iPods at the very least. Of course, as usual, the stumbling block in many cases is DRM. You’ll have to break the DMCA, not just encryption, if you want to enjoy an encrypted bestseller in your iPod’s notes mode. But wait. In 15 Trends to Watch in 2208, just out in Publishers Weekly, publishing guru Mike Shatzkin brings up a topic all too familiar to TeleBloggers—the possibility of Apple getting into e-books. What if Apple offered iPod-optimized goggles for e-reading?
Question: What are the pros and cons of e-book reading via goggles? And have any TeleBlog readers tried it? The idea of reading E off goggles is hardly new.
Related: My take in PW on Mike’s trends piece.
January 8th, 2008 at 9:21 am
It wouldn’t work for me. I now need glasses to bring things that are close up into focus. So I’d have to wear reading glasses *under* these. Nope.
I’ve tried such goggles in the past (when my eyes were still OK!). I wasn’t impressed. The claims of it being virtually a large TV are baloney. I always felt I was looking at a wee screen close to my eyeball.
January 8th, 2008 at 9:47 am
Like Mike, I’ve been watching this technology for a long time. I truly believe it is the future–that in a decade or two we’ll all either walk around with heads-up sunglasses, or maybe have images projected directly onto our optic nerves.
Whether there will be reading going on with such devices depends more on whether reading is going on at all (i.e., my fear of the post-literate society).
Surely whomever is designing such devices would make them compatible with Palms and iPAQs as well as with iPODS, right? If so, there are no additional DRM issues. Of course, they would be a boon to small pocketable devices rather than the tablet-sized dedicated readers.
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com
January 8th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Googles?
January 8th, 2008 at 11:47 pm
No, no, no. Very few people can focus on something that is only a few cm from the eye. It needs to have a set of lenses to make the screen appear further away, and I don’t think there’s any problem adding a dioptre adjuster to it to compensate for your glasses.
However, the real problem is that at whatever distance the screen appears to be it will most likely stay at that virtual distance all the time. I doubt very much that it’s good for an eye to be focused on the same distance for hours and hours, day after day, year after year. (Or maybe some advanced model could be adjustable, so that you could change the virtual screen distance every once in a while.)
January 9th, 2008 at 2:14 am
The FAQ section of the website mentions glasses and says the following:
Q: I wear glasses. Can I use the myvu?
A: The Myvu Corporation, in conjunction with Essilor International, has made available an Rx Clip-on Lens. This low-profile lens snaps easily onto the inside face of the myvu personal media viewer. Ordering information for the Rx Clip-on is available at http://www.myvu.com/rx or for more information you can call 800.338.4771.
I was interested in finding out about the resolution of the image and the FAQ says:
Q: How is the image quality?
A: The image quality is very comparable to an iPod screen. Both images are a quarter VGA resolution. Myvu doesn’t sacrifice image quality by diluting or pixelizing the image by stretching the field of view so you see a clear crisp image.
One-quarter VGA means 320 by 240 I believe, and that is a long way from HDTV. Maybe subpixel rendering could improve the image for text. Or maybe these types of glasses could have a monochrome mode in the future that would allow greater resolution.
The attempt to change the perceived fashionability of video goggles is intriguing. The use of multiple depictions of pretty women peering over eyewear on the website is an attempt to repudiate the “assimilated member of the borg collective” connotations.
The article text above does mix the terms goggle and google as Nathan Youngman notes. Remember: You can google while wearing goggles but you cannot wear googles.
January 9th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
The rest of you can go around looking like an X-Man or Geordi LaForge. I’ll be content snickering.
January 9th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
See Gizmodo. Item #9:
http://gizmodo.com/342495/ten-reasons-were-doomed-ces-edition