Author Nick Hornby posted an entry on his blog this week enumerating the reasons that eBooks are doomed. Hornby is an acclaimed author, and has written several successful novels that have been adapted to films (Fever Pitch, Figh Fidelity and About a Boy).
Comparing books to music, Hornby gives the following concerns about the viability of eBooks:
1) Book readers like books, whereas music fans never had much affection for CDs;
2) People don’t buy many books. Seven per person per year;
3) The advantages of the liad and the Kindle - that you can take vast numbers of books away with you - are of no interest to the average book-buyer;
4) Book-lovers are always late adapters, and generally suspicious of new technology.
Nick is missing some of the subtle and game changing aspects of eBooks. There are lots of reasons that eBooks make sense for both readers and publishers, and Hornby, as an author, is in the group that should be most excited about this new platform.
1) Hornby’s reasoning, that the average reader only buys 7 books a year, doesn’t account for the fact that owning an eBook reader increase the number of books readers buy. The Amazon Kindle allows readers to sample the first 30 pages or so of the books that it sells.
This concept eBook reader from researchers at the University of Maryland and UC Berkeley shows some novel ways of interacting with eBook hardware. One idea that seems interesting is a reader with two sides. Flip the reader over in one direction and it goes to the next page. Flip it over in other direction and it flips back. This concept has a ways to go however. Being a Kindle user myself, I can’t see people wanting to pretend to flip a page when they could just hit a button. See for yourself in the video below:
Don a set of video goggles, and drive this RC car from the perspective of the driver. The camera embedded in the car tracks your head movements, so when you look right the camera looks right. There was a video circulating of something similar to this with a RC plane, but this is the first commercial implementation of the concept I have seen.
Amazingly, the goggles can also track your head’s motion, where the camera on the buggy will respond accordingly, letting you look left, right, up and down. … Such a toy won’t come cheap though, as it retails for a whopping $1,172.
I used to do a bit of skateboarding when I was in college. Back then, we didn’t have anything like this electric skateboard from Altered Skateboards. With a top speed of 20 mph, and a wireless rc car style controller, these things look like a blast. If you are looking for some eco-friendly personal transportation, this might be a less pretentious alternative to a segway.
My advice to Altered, send one of these to Kevin Rose in San Francisco to ride back and forth to the Digg headquarters. Kevin’s got a huge following, and this kind of thing is right up his alley.
Read on for some more pics and a link to an impressive video of the company’s founder hanging ten on one of these. (more…)
The wireless SD Card product, Eye-Fi, just released two new versions of its wireless card for cameras.
The original Eye-Fi seemed exciting when it launched last year, but upon inspection was somewhat limited. The Eye-Fi device is a 2 gigabyte memory card for digital cameras that includes a wi-fi chip that allows photos to be moved automatically, and wirelessly to the user’s computers. The product includes integration with a variety of photo sharing services, so users can have their photos automatically uploaded to Flickr anytime their camera is within range of your home wi-fi network. The Eye-Fi card is very affordable at around $100, but was originally more limited than one would expect. The biggest drawback was that the card would only connect to your own network. (more…)
Cory Doctorow’s new young adult novel, Little Brother, is now available as a free download under a creative commons license. If you read this blog much, you know that I love creative commons and ebooks. The two go together like peanut butter and chocolate. You might know Cory from BoingBoing.net or his work with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. If you have a Kindle or Sony Reader, give this book a read. And if you like it, tell people. This model for publishing needs to be supported. [Update: Doctorow has also set up a program that allows readers to donate copies of the book to classrooms. If you like the book, and want to give back, this is a great way to do it.]
Little Brother » Download for Free: “These downloads are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license, which lets you share it, remix it, and share your remixes, provided that you do so on a noncommercial basis. Some people don’t understand why I do this — so check out this post if you want my topline explanation for why I do this crazy thing.”
For those of you that have been waiting for the Amazon to start shipping Kindles again, now is the time. I have to admit, I haven’t been using mine much lately, but it is still a pretty slick piece of technology and a sign of things to come.
More creative commons content for your Kindle or Sony Reader.
Maureen F. McHugh’s speculative fiction collection MOTHERS & OTHER MONSTERS has been released online by Small Beer Press as a free Creative Commons download.
Small Beer is knocking them out of the park with CC releases by some of science fiction’s most talented, most brilliant short fiction writers. An entire Maureen McHugh collection online gratis is a watershed event.
As an update to my post about the difference between the customer service at Shure and Sensaphonics, I finally received by custom sleeves for my Shure E3 earphones, and thought I would share my impressions of the final product. By way of background, Shure makes high end in-ear earphones. Shure earphones are expensive but isolate the sound and block out outside noise. They are fantastic. Sensaphonics is a company that makes custom in-ear monitors for musicians and high end personal use. They offer custom fit silicon sleeves for the Shure E3 earphones. These sleeves are custom molded to fit your ear canal and intended to provide even better sound quality and comfort.
Image via Wikipedia
The wireless SD Card product, 
1) Hornby’s reasoning, that the average reader only buys 7 books a year, doesn’t account for the fact that owning an eBook reader increase the number of books readers buy. The Amazon Kindle allows readers to sample the first 30 pages or so of the books that it sells.