Color Nook

[Kent Borg]

Richard Pieri wrote:
> On Dec 26, 2010, at 6:24 PM, Kent Borg wrote:
>   
>> Buy a DRMed e-book and it will eventually evaporate. It make take some 
>>     
>
> Y'know... this is totally irrelevant to the choice at hand.  Neither nook nor Kindle require encumbered books.

Indeed. My rant was whining about why I don't already have the (very 
cool) Kindle 3G.

As for the impermanence of PDF, I suspect it has hit critical mass and 
PDFs will be easily readable for many, many decades (though ironically, 
if PDFs stay alive as a current format and features are added, old PDFs 
might start to render oddly). Similarly durable is some sane subset of 
HTML. And the granddaddy of all: simple ASCII text files (particularly 
with DOS-style line endings) might well be readable until the end of time.

At least as abstract data. The problem with all of these is that they 
are digital and so need some storage medium.

Nothing new here, except for centuries we have taken for granted that 
Books are permanent (if kept dry, not burned by censors, not buried in 
earthquakes, not pillaged by invaders, not discarded, etc.) Then we 
invented cheap glue to hold together acid paper--but even those books 
can last decades. Now, in the case of DRM, books mostly lose the ability 
to store knowledge for a yet-to-come generation.

And all competing e-book readers are complicit in this.


-kb, the Kent who spreads Christmas cheer.