Personal computing: from P-books to E-books

TE R R Y M IU R A The dream of electronic books has been with us at least since Vannevar Bush published his famous article, “As We May Think,” in which he speculated on a desk-sized machine that would hold one’s personal writing and library [1]. Alan Kay named his prototype of the modern PC the Dynabook, and related research has been done at prestigious centers including Xerox PARC, MIT, Bell Labs, and Brown University. I have speculated about e-books and portable devices earlier (see [6, 7]), but am still reading paper books (p-books) because content is abundant and user interaction is simple and subconscious. The idea of an e-book is appealing— a single device with an entire library of interlinked documents, dictionary lookup, unlimited, sharable annotation, search capability, and so forth. But the technology to date has not been good enough to displace the p-book. Is it now? For a first pass at answering that question, I looked at two new e-book devices, the Rocket Ebook (REB) from NuvoMedia (www.nuvomedia.com) and the Softbook (SB) from Softbook Press (www.softbook.com). Both are PC pads with flash RAM storage and backlit, touch-sensitive monochrome screens. The REB is 5” x 7.5” and weighs 22 ounces; the SB is 8.75” x 8.5” and weighs 2.9 pounds. Both are designed solely for reading and annotating documents and have simple user interfaces. The REB has three buttons: on/off, page forward and page backward, and the SB has four buttons: a neat rocker switch for next/previous page plus menu, top-of-document, and devicecontents buttons. If I were an early gadget adopter or traveled a lot, I would own one of these devices. I prefer them to a standard laptop PC for reading. They balance well, have reasonable battery life, are small and light, turn pages fairly thoughtlessly, boot quickly and never display the Windows “blue