All those hardware guys at Dell, HP, and Asus have been watching the development of ebook readers and have come to the same conclusions as the rest of us who are not complete idiots.

"Huh? You are selling a .pdf reader for $500? You think that con is going to last?"



People are dumb, sure, but they are also poor, especially people who like to read.

This week, at the Consumer Electronics Expo in Las Vegas, all of the big PC manufacturers unveiled their versions of the "netbook," which is a tiny, cheap computer that is as fast as you need it to be to do everything you need to do. Soon, people will be masturbating in bed again instead of at their desks in front of their laptops. Netbooks fit in your jacket pocket, connect to the internet, store your shit, let you play music, and let you take pictures. If you use Skype, they even become a phone. Kids in the Sudan have them, and soon you will, too.

The Asus model "netbook" even has tablet, touch-screen capability, which makes it pretty damn close to being the Prodex described here.

Apple has a thousand people working on making the iPhone into one of these. I cannot say this loud enough, Publishing Industry: proprietary ebook formats are a BAD IDEA. I'm not talking to you people in the corner office, squeezing your stress ball and brokering deals with one of James Patterson's ghostwriters. I'm talking to you publishing interns and editorial assistants who are the future and who are surfing the internet at work, bored, wondering why you went to college. Your masters are wasting time and money dealing with Sony and Amazon. By working for them, you are wasting your creativity and a chance to reinvent an electronic publishing industry that is democratic, writer-driven, and isn't REVOLUTIONARY at all.

In fact, tomorrow's publishing industry will be positively Elizabethan.

All we are going to get rid of is the corporate whip.

Posted by miracle on Fri, 09 Jan 2009 17:42:04 -0500 -- permanent link