
Ray Kurzweil Vows To Right E-Reader Wrongs - donohoe
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/18/ray-kurzweil-vows-to-right-e-reader-wrongs/?src=twr
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frossie
The people I know who are aware of e-readers and have not adopted them are
holding off not because of presentation issues, but because of DRM concerns
("Once I buy this e-book, will I have the same freedom that I had with the
dead tree book?").

It may be that content presentation issues are holding off more _publishers_
from joining the fray, but the main beneficiaries of that would be textbook
publishers, and right now many of them don't seem to be very enthusiastic
about the e-book market at all.

Still, it will be interesting to see what happens.

[Edit in light of responses: I am not suggesting that people I know constitute
a representative sample; but I haven't seen much real data either - I would be
interested to know what the real issues are in the wider population]

~~~
henrikschroder
I'm holding off because it's just not the same thing. I read a few fiction
books a month, I enjoy going to a bookstore, picking out books, carrying them
home, reading them, and putting them on a shelf. I enjoy having friends over,
and discussing books while standing in front of the shelves. I can lend out my
books or give them away. Good books get worn and loved and scratched and used
and thumbed. I can place good books in better spots than bad books. And
they're all gonna last a lot longer than any electronic books and always be
accessible. A book has no bootup-time, no interface, no buttons, no
electricity, no charger, no bit-rot, no broken files, no virtual cloud-based
shelves tied to an arbitrary account, no uptime, no downtime, no batteries, no
keyboards, no nothing.

For fiction, having my entire library with me all the time is useless, because
that's just not how I read. I travel a lot, but only carry one or two books
with me. That's enough.

It's been a long while since I was in school or university and read textbooks,
but the value of having actual paper books that you can write your own notes
and drawings in is very high.

For reference books, when I need them, I'm usually at a computer anyway, and
why look in a single reference book when I can use the entire internet
instead?

DRM? That's at the bottom of the list of drawbacks with e-books for me.

~~~
JustinSeriously
This is the issue for most people I know as well. Everyone I know who reads a
lot also enjoys the experience _around_ reading, from browsing bookstores to
the care and feeding of a good bookshelf.

When it comes to DRM, I don't think it's a big issue, because,

\- Non-tech people don't care about it.

\- Tech people care deeply about it, but know how to get a pirated copy in
case the DRM crashes on them.

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henrikschroder
This was a slightly surprising footnote in the article:

 _When not making e-reader software and predicting man’s future, Mr. Kurzweil
spends some time building automated financial trading systems for hedge funds
through a company called FatKat._

It seems like everyone needs to build a bankruptcy engine at least once.

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sliverstorm
To me, e-readers are not about software.

Simply put, for me the Kindle 2 is good enough in the software department, and
perfect in the hardware department. All that is left is refinements.

I find myself shaking my head every time someone trumpets a new e-reader or
e-reader software. I'm probably a minority in this, but in my opinion none of
them get it; the most important part of the e-reader is that e-ink display.

Books that are not pure text and require images and formatting are a different
beast, but I would argue that segment of the book industry can be best
addressed with a Kindle DX-esque device and color e-ink, whenever that comes
about. Of course, they will never be able to fix the most difficult part of
reference books. A pure text book is usually read linearly, front to back.
Reference books are flipped through, bookmarking pages with dog-ears and
fingers. Text search is amazing, but it doesn't make up for that quick-scan,
easily-navigated ability of reference books.

~~~
aristus
Really? I'm trying out a kindle dx, and I hate that I have to press the shift
key on each and every digit of the number of a page I want to go to. You'd
think they'd default to digits on the "go to page" dialog. Also the buttons
feel like they are going to break.

Maybe different strokes for different folks...

~~~
sliverstorm
I was confused by your comment, as I have never had this issue. I just looked
at my Kindle 2 and figured out why; it has number keys. I'm not sure why they
took them out on the DX.

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bitwize
Uhhhhh....

My Android has a pdf reader. It renders anything that fits within its memory
constraints easily.

How is Kurzweil Handwaving, Inc. going to substantially improve on that? Scale
it up to a nice sharp (PixelQi?) display, put it on a tablet -- presto.

~~~
Goosey
Not sure why you are getting downvoted so much. I had the exact same thoughts
after reading this.. "Uhm, so we have a new post script?"

~~~
jonhohle
PDF and postscript have no ability to reflow text. That is a huge limitation
for reading the same content on mobile devices, tablets, and PCs. This has
been discussed before here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1394134>

I think its somewhat sad that Knuth solved this problem in 1978 and we're
still dealing with terribly formatted web pages and ebooks over 30 years
later.

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mikecane
Does anyone here know any of the tech specifics of Blio? I think I'd read
months ago it was based on PDF?

