Books have a kind of usability that, for most people, isn’t about to be trumped by bourgeois concerns about portability: They are the only auto-playing, backwards-compatible to the dawn of the English language, entirely self-contained medium we have left.
Filed under: information technology, Technology Review
This is my main qualm — no “legs” for each owned copy: “publishers have largely made it impossible, or at least difficult, to loan, trade or re-sell ebooks, for fear of piracy. Paradoxically, this could have the eventual effect of lowering customers’ willingness to buy new books – because there’s no chance they’ll ever recoup a portion of the cost by selling or sharing the book.”
It conjures images of Fahrenheit 451, with people wandering around reciting books in order to keep alive the potential of an audience . . .