Amy Wohl creates a nice primer on ebooks for the knowlegeable and not-so-knowledgeable. [ thanks aaron ] [thanks, librarian.net] The piece is very accurate afaik. In passing, it mentions Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, which also posits electronic ink will faciliate what's called The Daily Me:
...Hackworth picked up a large sheet of blank paper.The usual,he said, and then the paper was no longer blank; now it was the front page of the Times.
Hackworth got all the news that was appropriate to his station in life, plus a few optional services: the latest from his favorite cartoonists and columnists around the world; clippings on various peculiar crackpot subjects forwarded to him by his father...; and stories relating to the Uitlanders.... Hackworth's mother was an Uitlander, so he subscribed to the service.
The piece goes on to discuss electronic ink and the future of the technology, and that At a recent conference on eBook technology, one speaker predicted that the New York Times ? on paper - wouldn't exist by 2018.
Of course, Stephenson says otherwise:
A gentleman of higher rank and more far-reaching responsibilities would probably get different information written in a different way, and the top stratum of New Chusan actually got the Times on paper, printed out by a big antique press that did a run of a hundred or so, every morning at about three AM....
Now nanotechnology had made nearly anything possible, and so the cultural role in deciding what should be done with it had become far more important than imagining what could be done with it. One of the insights of the Victorian Revival was that it was not necessarily a good thing for everyone to read a completely different newspaper in the morning; so the higher one rose in the society, the more similar one's Times became to one's peers'.
The weblog/aggregator world is a precursor to The Daily Me: one selects feeds from which items are pulled, and such are listed in a single page for perusal. Choose your national and world news providers, and feeds for whatever subculture you're into where available. The main thing missing now is prioritization: everything's on the front page,
so it's difficult to find the important things. There's plenty of discussion about how to fix that, but at this point there's not such.
So while they're working on the hardware, we're building the software.
