Skip to main content

Kindle's Cool, but Remember the Web?

If anyone can obsolete the printed book, Amazon can, and they're clearly taking a formidable whack at it with their handheld Kindle reader.

We can't help wondering, though, how many consumers will really pay $400 for a single-purpose reading device, when alternatives from a riotously competitive hardware market combine reading with phone, messaging, music and other capabilities.

For example, the iPhone pictured here, with a tasty looking page delivered via Tizra's Agile PDF. We wish we could say it's the result of some special technology we came up with for delivering books to mobile devices, but really it's just a byproduct of the fact that Agile PDF makes books work like the web. So as the web finds its way into more mobile devices, so will books published with Agile PDF. Meanwhile, of course, there are already a billion or so eager readers accessing the web through more traditional means.

By the way, the sesame crusted tuna's from Montreal's Aix Cuisine du Terroir, one of hundreds of restaurants reviewed by the eat.shop guides, which you'll be hearing more about soon.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Princeton University Press Partners with Tizra to Take Einstein Papers Online

Unprecedented project will make nearly 30 volumes of Albert Einstein's papers available throughout the world. October 9, 2013 (Providence, RI) -- Princeton University Press has selected Tizra as the digital publishing platform it will use to make The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein available online.  One of the most ambitious publishing ventures ever undertaken in the documentation of the history of science, The Collected Papers will ultimately comprise more than 14,000 papers selected from all phases of Einstein's career and fill nearly 30 volumes. The online version hosted by Tizra will provide easy, searchable access to the full archive, and will offer features including: Powerful, bilingual search, with page-specific search results. Links between German text and corresponding English translations. Persistent, page-specific URLs to facilitate citation, referencing and discussion. Easy online viewing in all common web browsers, including those on the most p...

The Best Freaking Web Browsing Machine Ever

Contrary to our recent post, we do not actually believe Apple intended the iPad as a Tizra viewer . For all the talk of Apps and iBooks, the iPad's real significance is that it does a better job than anything we've yet seen of lowering barriers to using the web. You don't have to wait for it to boot up, it doesn't need to be recharged all the time, is small enough to keep on you most of the time, but is big enough that you don't have to squint or scroll too much when reading and can fit enough of your fingers on it to type reasonably well. Plus its touchscreen is intuitive enough and response is fast enough that you don't lose your train of thought while getting from one place to another. As Tim Bray says, " speed is a feature ." All these things come together to create something that enables us to work the web—with all its incredible power to inform and facilitate interaction—into more and more of the corners of our lives where it didn't ...