The eBook Phenom: A Tetrad

When I bought my Kindle in 2008 I knew that I had a new and phenomenal form of technology that would take off as a "must have"...eventually. With my busy schedule I always managed to read at least a book each week or so and the Kindle made it so much easier to carry my favorite book of the moment with me wherever I went. The cost was a bit prohibitive for most casual book readers as opposed to a thick hardcover but I also knew that as an emerging form of technology, and due to the law of supply and demand, the cost would drop considerably...which it did, two years later.

The catalogue of available books for my Kindle is about 775,000 now, most of which, if I lived a very long time, I would never be able to read, but I do have a vast choice at a nominal cost compared to the cost of a hardcover book. It is easy to read, even outside in the sunlight, and automatically saves my page when I close its cover.

Amazon was not the first to offer an electronic reading device, but through clever marketing (including a plug by Oprah!) and a built-in customer base, it was brought to the attention of millions of readers everywhere. As a matter of fact, back in 1971 Michael Hart of Illinois University decided to create a digital library for books from the public domain with his Project Gutenberg. Imagine being able to read books on a computer (way before pc's surfaced) by inserting a disk into the drive. It started out with one book per disk when the capacity of a disk was 350k, but "necessity, being the mother of invention," increased that considerably with the advent of zip drives, compression, and then ever increasing storage capacities. Project Gutenberg is still going strong offering free books, documents, and downloads.

Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg, at Xerox's PARC, were ahead of their time as early as 1972 when Kay envisioned a reader the size of a notebook and developed a prototype, Dynabook. Unfortunately, technology and the availability of book titles limited what they could do with their system at the time. But to me, the prototype looks very much like a Kindle or even an iPad.

Many people, including me, enjoy the look, feel, smell of a "real" book and seem to frown on the possible obsolescence of the book...won't happen, at least not in the foreseeable future, IMO. Electronic reading devices are just another means of disbursing information. It will become an emerged technology at some point, but not to worry. I would just like to see it in the public school systems soon to alleviate the necessity of students lugging big old texts around and probably ruining a lot of backs.

I am certain that consumers will eventually tire of having a bagload of devices with which to communicate daily. Most smartphones are multifunctional right now. So, one universal device will be used for communication: to talk; to read; to access the internet; to text; to write communiques; to listen to music; and/or to play games. Hop-skip a few years and it may be a mini-device, the size of a quarter, which will project onto any surface and be manipulated to act as a reader, a monitor, a keyboard. As the old s

aying goes -- whatever the mind can conceive, it can achieve. By then we will remember fondly when we used a Kindle-like device for reading, which may remind some that a man named Gutenberg started it all with a printing press that could mass produce..."books."

Gutenberg Internet Archive. (2010). Project Gutenberg. Retrieved from http://www.archive.org/details/gutenberg

Kay, A. & Goldberg, A. (1977). Personal dynamic media. Computer, 10(3), 31-41. Retrieved from http://www.newmediareader.com/book_samples/nmr-26-kay.pdf

Kindle. (2010). Amazon Store. Retrieved from http://www.amazon.com/

Lebert, M. (2009). A short history of ebooks. NEF, University of Toronto: Canada. Retrieved from http://www.etudes-francaises.net/dossiers/ebookEN.pdf

Whittaker, R. (2010). The print media. CyberCollege Internet Campus. Retrieved from http://www.cybercollege.com/frtv/book1.htm