My memory of computing goes back beyond “c-dot-prompt”, right back to the days of handing a deck of punch cards through the window for batching on the old university mainframe. So I have seen quite a few innovations in that time.
My prediction is that Kindle is going to be one of the major innovations in the information revolution. Especially now that Amazon has left the proprietory gate open and you can download a software app for your iPhone and of course your PC.
A big part of my excitement arises from my frustration that Kindle as a full blown service has not launched in Australia. In fact I have not even been able to source the device over here.
So the iPhone Kindle app is pretty exciting news in Australia.
I downloaded the app from www.mobipocket.com. They also have a lot of freebie books; so you can check if you find the reading experience to your liking.
If you do like it, you can pick up heaps of books from several sources for prices often free or in single digits.
This allowed me to try the deal out on my PC. And it all certainly matched up with my reading habits, including the ability to make notes in the margin.
By the way, I also feel that tagging using XML is going to be huge. It is a bit like having an assistant read a mega-sized report for you with a highlighter which is used to mark up the bits of the article which are relevant to your project. You can then skim the highlighted bits and read anything that grabs your curiosity in one seamless act. Summarising is obviously one great way to add value to information.
Anyway, it so happens that Optus have a nice package wireless deal running on iPhones until the end of May. So I am about to go mobile with my e-books. I will be able sit away from the screen and read e-documents much as I read a paperback or a newspaper at the moment.
Does anyone have any experience of the smaller iPhone screen?
I know that the software reformats the text into pages which can be read without scrolling. So I am hoping that the only impact will be that you have to turn the pages more often. Since this is only a single click, it should not affect things too negatively.
What do others think about the whole Kindle innovation?
Does anyone have any strong views about where XML is heading?
I gather Tim Berners-Lee remains a strong believer. And to me it certainly looks like a good fix for a massive dose of information overload brought to us courtesy of the web.
It reminds me of the old Woody Allen joke. He said that he had just been to a speed reading course.
“I read War and Peace in just 30 minutes. And my comprehension was brilliant, too. It’s about Russia!”
Bye for now.
