Most of these, with the possible exception of the feel of the book in your hand can be replicated by an ebook.
Not ebooks in their current state, of course, but by a hypothetical electronic book that has more capability. I suspect paper books will become like vinyl, hobbyists and retro obsessed will still have a lot, but most people will only keep a few for sentimental reasons (e.g. your grandfather).
There are some great ideas here for anyone who wants to take advantage of them:
- Add drawing support and overdrawing/highlighting to the ereader (this should be there now, lord knows why it isn't).
- Put a display on the back of the ereader so people can see the title of what you're reading. This sounds terribly egotistical, but so is twitter, and it's not doing too bad :-)
- Use a (very: e.g. 8'x4') large picture frame/bookcase display to show all the books (and media and art and whatever else) you currently have in your living room or study or whatnot. The technology is not quite up to doing this at scale, but I can see it happening. I do think a human friendly way to browse media not tied to a remote control or sitting down in front of a rectangle or peering through the aperture of a handheld device will be a majorly successful consumer electronic device in the future.
I also don't think that ebooks will somehow demote text-only to secondary status. After all, what do you think you're reading now? :-) Even if you look at the web in general, the best sites (for reading) have text as the backbone, and if they have other media, it's more about supporting the text with a diagram or an example -- not a stage or a soundtrack.
I'd say it probably doesn't really replicate the feel because human tactile sense is so subtle, but it's cool to know these exist! I might pick one up.
Not ebooks in their current state, of course, but by a hypothetical electronic book that has more capability. I suspect paper books will become like vinyl, hobbyists and retro obsessed will still have a lot, but most people will only keep a few for sentimental reasons (e.g. your grandfather).
There are some great ideas here for anyone who wants to take advantage of them:
- Add drawing support and overdrawing/highlighting to the ereader (this should be there now, lord knows why it isn't).
- Put a display on the back of the ereader so people can see the title of what you're reading. This sounds terribly egotistical, but so is twitter, and it's not doing too bad :-)
- Use a (very: e.g. 8'x4') large picture frame/bookcase display to show all the books (and media and art and whatever else) you currently have in your living room or study or whatnot. The technology is not quite up to doing this at scale, but I can see it happening. I do think a human friendly way to browse media not tied to a remote control or sitting down in front of a rectangle or peering through the aperture of a handheld device will be a majorly successful consumer electronic device in the future.
I also don't think that ebooks will somehow demote text-only to secondary status. After all, what do you think you're reading now? :-) Even if you look at the web in general, the best sites (for reading) have text as the backbone, and if they have other media, it's more about supporting the text with a diagram or an example -- not a stage or a soundtrack.
EDIT: Oh! and for battery life -- go solar :-)