Avi now writes for Driss-A-Blog
| 2001-07-12, 11:30 PM:
Yesterday, I was digging around the Power Mac 7100, and I found a disk image called, simply, "Gibson.img". I copied it onto my PowerBook, unpacked it, dug up a copy of the HyperCard Player, and let it rip. eBooks. I remember the first time I read an eBook, or whatever they were called at the time. It was about four years ago, if not more, and it was the Gibson trio, the Neuromancer/Count Zero/Mona Lisa Overdrive trilogy. They were "Voyager Expanded Books", although for the life of me I can't understand what made them expanded. They allowed you to mark pages with virtual paper clips, enlarge the size of text, and show you a progress bar so you knew how far you were into the book. And that's about it. But, despite that, I read the black-and-white, 12-point-Palatino book, staring at the screen for hours on end, day after day, marking pages with a paper clip, until I came to the end. I thought that I liked this medium, although it was probably the book that I liked more than the fact that I had to sit staring at a slightly fuzzy screen to read it. So when we went to California for the CAJE conference, I went to the ComputerWare store, looked around, and bought another eBook. It was "Society of Mind" by Marvin Minsky. Voyager had improved its technology quite a lot. The book came on a CD-ROM, and included movies and audio clips to illustrate its points. So I brought it home and installed it and started reading it. I never made it past the first chapter. It's not that it wasn't a good book. I did like it. But all the media didn't help make it compelling enough to read that I would go through the trouble of sitting there like I was willing to do with Gibson. Then I got a Newton handheld, and I experimented with books on it. It has book reading software built into ROM, and there were books that people compiled from public-domain texts. It was a lot better than reading an eBook on a computer screen, since I could take the Newton anywhere and read anywhere. But there was a scarcity of decent titles and the screen contrast was horrible except for bright light. After I read Moby Dick on it, I gave up. Now, the Newton is a wonderful platform for reference-style books. I compiled a FAQ for Zelda: Ocarina of Time to refer to while playing the game. But reading a book is just too much. The Voyager Company is now part of Learn Technologies Interactive. They now publish all kinds of CD-ROMs, although they still publish some eBooks, but not as many as they did before. As for me, I've sworn off eBooks. Too much of a pain. But I copied the Gibson set from the 7100 to the PowerBook, and I've started to read it. Let's see how long I can take it before I go to the store and get a real, paper, copy. |
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· 2002-12-16: A Unicode problem · 2002-12-15: Soul affliction · 2002-12-15: No power? · 2002-12-13: Camera's ready · 2002-12-12: Grr... �