Reading electronically

Slowly, but surely e-books are becoming viable. We are still working out the kinks of the electronic reading experience. This blog post examines how our current reading habits developed during the course of history and where they are heading.

How we got here

The printed book still is the reigning champion when it comes to a pleasant reading experience. The following bullet points sketch its history.

• It all started with single slabs of clay or wood. For example, clay tokens have been used in Mesopotamia as early as 8000 B.C. and later evolved into cuneiform script (around 3400 B.C.).
• Next were papyrus scrolls as used by the Egyptians (3000 B.C.).
• The following achievement was to use pages instead of scrolls. This had the advantages of much quicker access (skimming a book is much simpler than skimming a scroll) and of indexability (table of contents, keyword index, etc.). Both are crucial for efficiently managing knowledge. Intriguingly, the western recipe for scientific success, reductionism has been applied here, too: You split a big problem into small pieces that can be handled more easily.
• Finally, paper was an important step, because it could be mass-produced (in contrast with the alternatives papyrus and, later, parchment). It was common in Europe by the 15th century and invented in China much earlier, around the 2nd century A.D.
• The Gutenberg bible (1455) began the establishment of movable type printing. It improved on woodblock printing by having more durable materials and more uniform lettering.
  

Where we are going

Electronic books and the devices for reading them are the next evolutionary step in reading. We can now have the best of both worlds: The fluid reading experience of scrolls and the efficient access of books. Current e-book readers still have mostly paged content, but I expect that to change over time. As an inspiring vision for how we might read magazines in the future, take a look at a study done by Bonnier (article includes a movie—watch it). It presents some nice ideas for how to translate the design language of the printed page to electronic reading devices.

Further reading

• “An abbreviated history of books” (designhistory.org)
  
• “History of writing materials” (historyworld.net)
  

Disney’s KeyChest: Making DRM bearable

What is one of the biggest advantages of digital video? Distributing it is cheap and simple, it is always just an internet download away. Well, from the standpoint of the video industry, that is also its biggest disadvantage. Because pirating content is simpler, getting paid for it is also becoming more difficult. Thus, while it can be considered an impediment to technical progress, video DRM won’t go away as long as the industry considers it vital for its survival. The main hassle for consumers is that there are many competing DRM standards: Flash video DRM, Windows Media DRM, iTunes video DRM, etc. Thus, if you have rented a video on one device, say, your desktop computer, then that does not mean you’ll be able to play it on another device, say, you mobile phone.
Disney’s KeyChest is a proposal that might make DRM more bearable for consumers: A central agency registers the digital videos one owns or has rented. Ownership and/or rental rights are then enabled for all participating DRM systems. This is a conceptual shift from ownership to access rights and opens up all kinds of possibilities: Buy a Blu-ray Disc, then download a file for your mobile video player; have all your videos stored on the Internet and stream them to your computer to watch them; etc.
Short-term, KeyChest is a good idea. Long-term, we hopefully won’t need it. Whether or not DRM goes away also depends on how the audio industry fares with its decision to make all audio content DRM-free. In a perfect future, we will all be able to freely share content while the people who created it get compensated adequately.

Gestural computing: use your hands without touching

Gestural computing could be the answer to adopting multi-touch for desktop computers, where it hasn’t caught on as much as on cell phones. Gestural computing records hand movements in front of your computer. Thus, you don’t have to touch (and smudge) your screen and 3D gestures become possible. Not having to touch means that you don’t have to get as close, which is a good fit for current desktop setups where the monitor stands apart from the keyboard (=your hands). When typing a lot, you can just lift your hand briefly, perform a gesture, and then continue typing. In full gesture mode, you’ll probably look a bit like Tom Cruise in Minority Report (minus the gloves).
As mentioned in the article, touchless operation is a big plus in public spaces where hygiene really matters (just think about all the people touching an ATM screen).

Hated “The Phantom Menace"? Then this video review is for you.

Quoting “The Watcher”:

Finally, I watched this 70-minute critique of "Star Wars" prequel "The Phantom Menace" last night with increasing fascination and delight. It's hilarious, spot-on, perceptive, devastatingly accurate and more than a little surreal. Hey, don't take my word for it -- "Lost" executive producer Damon Lindelof said you should "watch it ALL" and actor/writer Simon Pegg said that it was "amazing." Agreed.

The humor does not always work for me, but it is still fun and makes some very good points.

Furniture for easier relocation

Having recently moved, I’m astonished how painful the process is, even though I don’t have a lot of stuff. There are a few cool ideas out there:

• Casulo: A design that allows one to fold complete furniture for a small apartment into a compact, relatively small, box. No tools are needed and it is supposed to take about 10 minutes.
  
• Furniture made of lightweight building boards: Only the outer hull of these boards is made of timber-derived materials, the inside consists of cardboard. This reduces material consumption by 40%. The reduction in weight is increasingly sought after, because customs have begun to charge by weight and wood is being used for heating and thus becoming more expensive. Lastly, light furniture is now easier to sell, because younger high-tech influenced generations don’t equate “heavy” with “quality”, any more. [Source in German]
  In fact, a study found out that 76% of Germans don’t think that lighter furniture has less quality. But, only 16.6% would buy furniture made partially out of cardboard. Well, I guess, you would have to see such furniture, in order to make a realistic decision. “Cardboard furniture” might conjure up the wrong image. [Source in German]
  
• Gube Instant Furniture: Uses building blocks (mainly cubes) to assemble various kinds of furniture configurations. No tools are needed.

Additionally, the increasing popularity and real-world suitability of e-book readers should help with moving. Sometimes I have the feeling that the total weight of my books equals the total weight of the rest of everything I own. Already digitalization has helped me with trimming down: My iMac has replaced my hifi system, my TV, my VCR and my DVD player. And I now could get rid of all of my CDs, should the need arise. (But I’ll be waiting for a file system that corrects errors, until I do that; btrfs is a promising and free candidate.)

Have you heard of other ways of owning less or lighter stuff? Let me know...

Christopher Avery on responsibility

Christopher Avery has a nice take on the topic of responsibility:
In his view, if something goes wrong, the mind has several automated responses, none of them completely adequate (in order of increased maturity):

• Denial
• Lay blame
• Justify: Interestingly, he does not think that justifying one's actions is useful and puts this activity in a category similar to laying blame.
• Shame: Obviously, beating yourself up over something that went wrong is as unproductive as beating someone else up.
• Obligation: There is a lot of honor in the idea that someone “has” to do something. On the other hand, using the words “have to” (as in “I still have to do the dishes”) automatically creates friction as no one likes to be forced to do something, even by oneself.

Avery suggests that true responsibility goes beyond all these automated responses. One can work towards the goal of responsibility by refusing to accept some of the mind’s simpler answers for a given problem.

Adults must be supervised

This is a photo I made in London:It is obvious what they mean, but I liked the idea of adults having to be supervised by children.