

Introducing The Kno.. a revolutionizing digital textbook - obsaysditto
http://www.kno.com/the-kno.html

======
raimondious
My interest is piqued:

 _As proof of our commitment: from the start we treated our own internal app
developers as third party developers. A developer-friendly environment is in
our blood. We’re powered by the WebKit browser engine, so if you can build a
website, you can build a Kno app._

Also, don't miss the photos on the home page. This thing is enormous.

Engadget has a hands on: [http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/02/kno-dual-screen-
tablet-ap...](http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/02/kno-dual-screen-tablet-
appears-at-d8-we-go-hands-on/) (edit)

~~~
tcdent
Judging by the pictures linked above, I think they went too big with it. It's
more of a coffee table book than a textbook.

~~~
sh1mmer
Are you trying to learn or surf youtube on the couch?

If they are trying to go application specific for learning I'd rather have a
big ass device that kicks ass with textbooks, than suffer a 9" screen.

If you compare it to the text book load of a student now it's a huge
improvement.

Also since one of the screens is for note taking, you are also remove that
additional stuff as well.

While a device that large seems counter-intuitive, it's made for purpose not
general computing.

~~~
tcdent
This device would be amazing for consuming media on the couch. I'm questioning
its usability in a typical students day.

Reducing it to 9 inches is taking it to the extreme, even 11 or 12 inch
displays would still be perfectly adequate and cut down on it's size and
weight.

------
cwilson
The Kno... revolutionizing digital textbooks with a 5.5 pound, original xbox
size, dual screen tablet device that starts just under $1,000.

Shoot me in the face.

~~~
jmtame
if i were currently an undergrad, i wouldn't want to pull that thing out in a
lecture. i don't know if i could even fit it, given some of the tight seating
in the lecture halls i went to. everyone uses a laptop or notepad for note
taking and that's about as much space as they can afford. i definitely think
they should come out with a smaller form factor.

the other issue is pricing. this device has to significantly beat the price of
used textbooks.

~~~
nooneelse
It can do things that paper textbooks don't; it isn't competing just on price.

For instance, how about you mark stuff as important which not only lets you
flip through just those bits later but it also puts that chunk of information
in your automated "review-stuff" queue. Give that queue a "which things to
pop-up when" scheduler based on measurements of your retrieval success rate
fall-off over time and some memory science, i.e. it can be a textbook that
reinforces the important bits just before your brain was about to forget them.
You could even reward a regimen of shoving information through the student's
attention... "rewrite these notes for extra points."

The size, sure it can be streamlined some, but this isn't for mostly passive
content consumption and casual gaming so it should never be iPad sized.

~~~
donw
Um, why shouldn't it be iPad sized? I've spent two years looking at memory
algorithms, and a similar amount of time implementing and dogfooding learning
systems... call it my hobby.

Cro-Mag Rally is _way_ more computationally intensive than anything I've
worked with or seen. Perhaps more importantly, the more intricate scheduling
systems don't perform any better than the simpler systems.

The real key to making any sort of repetitive study system work isn't really
in the scheduling algorithm -- it's in making the system easy to use and
always available.

If it's a lot of work to get information into or out of a spaced repetition
system, then you won't use it. If you can't study whenever you've got a spare
five minutes, then you won't use it. If you can't hit it from your desktop,
iPad, Motorola Droid, iPhone, laptop, and computer in the library, then you
won't use it. Because it's inconvenient.

So please, bring on the iPad learning systems. It's portable, lightweight, and
can speak WiFi and 3G. Anything that makes studying more convenient is good.

~~~
nooneelse
Very good point on the need for a repetitive study system to be always
available.

The bit about iPad being too small comes from asking something like "why
aren't textbooks the size of fictional paperbacks?" I suppose it could be just
historical accident or the need for enough page mass that the book lays flat
and open. But seems to me that the answer also includes something along the
lines of different types of information being better shown at different sizes,
with richer learning material needing more room. When the target users already
carry a bag all the time, should portability of a textbook replacement be so
overriding a concern that the area for showing and writing information is
slashed by something like half (iPad screen to college notebook ratio) up
front? Shouldn't form follow function a little more than that?

The really old college textbooks (1950's and earlier) I have are actually
smaller than modern versions, with text areas comparable or smaller than an
iPad screen. So perhaps the question can be reformulated as "why did textbooks
get bigger over the past century?" Or maybe there is just a lot less reasoning
behind their sizes than I'm presupposing.

~~~
donw
My guess has more to do with sales and marketing than anything else. I've got
more than a few textbooks from the 50's and 60's on a variety of subjects, and
for the most part, they are a _joy_ to read, because they assume the reader is
intelligent enough to not try and eat the chalkboard erasers.

Big textbooks, with lots of diagrams, pictures, and colors, look impressive.
They give the impression of a tome filled with knowledge and wisdom, whether
or not they actually are. Which is why school districts and professors in
charge of lower-division courses buy the damn things -- they get impressive-
looking textbooks to wow the students and parents, and they don't have to
think much about the choice.

It's just good marketing.

------
asolove
Tablets are going to expose all sorts of new ways of interacting with
hypertext on the client side. Supporting html5 is nice for authors, but the
real revolution comes when readers can compare multiple hypertext documents,
naturally browse through interlinked documents, make annotations, etc. These
things have been tried and failed on other form factors, but I think they
might succeed on a device like this, Courier or the iPad where the new form-
factor requires new interaction models anyway.

This device doesn't look perfect, but they're exploring the most interesting
aspect of the tablet problem.

~~~
stcredzero
Check out Popplet. I think something like this could be used as a framework to
enable most of the functionality shown in Microsoft's Courier vaporware video.
(But in a multi-touch friendly way)

<http://popplet.com/>

If other applications could be integrated, such that arbitrary docs could
appear in a Popplet-window, then this gives us a task/document-centric way for
users to integrate and organize all of their data. (Such that applications
disappear into the background, and it's their data that matters.)

~~~
nooneelse
Very neat, thanks for sharing that. If data from other application could be
integrated like that, would that get it kicked off the iPad under the new "no
new 'desktop' environments" rule?

------
swah
Make you own Kno. You will need:

\- 2 x Apple iPad

\- 1 x Hinge

~~~
jmtame
not entirely true, although i think you are being a little facetious. this
device seems a lot more open in general (use of flash for example).

~~~
whughes
It's a textbook. Flash doesn't matter. The content needs to be there. I've
read textbooks on my iPad before; for the most part, it works OK. There
doesn't appear to be any big advantage to the Kno that couldn't be matched in
a specialized iPad app.

------
mildweed
Reminds me of this competition for brand names worse than Knol:

[http://voltagecreative.com/blog/2008/08/50-for-worse-
brand-n...](http://voltagecreative.com/blog/2008/08/50-for-worse-brand-name-
than-knol-we-have-a-winner/)

~~~
Vekz
This was originally branded the Kakai.

[http://social.venturebeat.com/2010/01/20/chegg-founders-
stea...](http://social.venturebeat.com/2010/01/20/chegg-founders-stealthy-
kakai-building-a-gesture-based-consumer-device/)

www.kakai.com now redirects to www.kno.com

It is a project by the Founder of Chegg.com a service that specializes in
textbook rentals.

I'm not really enticed by any of their branding.

------
RevRal
Yes! I've been waiting for an ebook reader that I can use to take hand-written
notes with.

I really can't concentrate on a book unless I have a pencil in hand,
underlining, circling, and taking notes. Stylus instead of pencil, here.

------
foamdino
Having just researched Personal Learning Environments (PLE's) [1] - this is a
timely reminder of just how bad standard teaching portal type application are
for the goal of teaching and learning. Hopefully this will spawn a few
imitators which will drive the costs down so that it isn't just useful in the
US.

[1][http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.97....](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.97.2772&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

------
seasoup
Drop the hardware, write an iPad app. They do some very cool things with the
software that neither the kindle nor Apples book reader app satisfies. But
when it comes down to how to spend the money, $1000 on one Kno or two iPads,
there isn't enough of a value add on for the Kno. In fact, the iPad has more
features and a better form factor.

Kno is about a year late for their hardware, but their software could work as
an iPad app.

------
norswap
So basically, it's a tablet, but it's as unpractical to use as a laptop. (If
you can use it comfortably somewhere, you can probably use a laptop instead.)

------
ygd
I would want one of these if there were enough textbooks and the price was
reasonable.

------
mkramlich
An approximate equivalent would be a tablet/laptop and a paper notebook and
pen.

------
benofsky
It looks cool but it's massive and with two screens that size and the
batteries that would be required to support them, I can imagine that it is
_very_ heavy.

Which is definitely one of the biggest problems with paper textbooks,
something we should try and get away from with etextbooks.

~~~
OmarIsmail
It'd probably weigh about the same amount as a first year Calc textbook. This
is actually one area where the standard for improvement isn't very high.
Textbooks weigh A LOT, and I think it's getting to the point where people's
posture and backs are being negatively affected. Let alone the day you need to
move...

Compared to something like an iPad, this Kno is going to be a hell of a lot
heavier, so it's just a matter of what the students are comparing against.

This is all moot though as the major pain point with textbooks are their
obscene pricing. If this is just the same old overpriced textbooks, just in
digital form, it's interesting but hardly a game changer.

~~~
enjo
The sticking point with text books IS the printing. My wife (PhD and
professor) would love to move to digital text books. In the digital realm
there are actually entire text books that aren't widely available in print.
They are also MUCH cheaper for the students.

<http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/> is one example. There are others I can't
remember right now.

This device seems to knock down a LOT of barriers. The two screens allow for
the space needed to show all of the content a professor might Believe it or
not, THE biggest thing slowing adoption of electronic text books is the
ability to take notes want to expose at once. The students can take notes on
the pages (this is a huge deal for adoption believe it or not). It enables
open and cheaper options...

I like it a lot. I think they have a winner if they've executed well.

------
chbrown
Looks hackernews-inspired: two iPads and some Sugru to hold them together.

