i’ve been thinking about this for a while, but i sort of crystallized while i was sitting in religions class this morning. i was thinking about e-paper, and how one day we’ll never know how we lived w/o it.
granted, i don’t doubt that the traditional book form will be with us for a long time, it’s cheap and easy to make, but if you have an intuitive, high resolution, tactile interface (epaper we’re talking about remember, not this ebook crap), you have something that’s as easy to read as paper, but with the advantage of, being able to create annotations w/ full and random access, as well as creates all sorts of connections, to other books (that can be loaded dynamically, etc. so, you can be carrying around your whole library (on media or w/ wireless access), which can be organized by as many views as you can think of (which can include timestamps of every action you’ve performed if you wanted it), with dynamic hyperlinking, annotation, and notes storage.
nothing particularly new about this thought (ted nelson‘s been thinking about it for the past 40 years), but i’m pretty sure that this idea of the epaper-ebook will come into its own in the next 10yrs. xanadu will still be vaporware 😛
back to work now. why the hell do i need to memorize 67 slides for art history? is this really the best use i have for my braincells?