[extropy-chat] Boks On-line, was Re: Drexler laying down a hand...

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sat, Mar 03, 2007 at 11:45:28AM -0800, Jef Allbright wrote:

> I find electronic versions of books to be far preferable to paper
> copies, and I routinely cut and scan any paper books I acquire.  So

It depends on your reader. The current displays, especially in mobiles,
are not up to snuff. It can't be that hard to build a tough waterproofed
version of a WiFi tablet for a VAIO-quality display for a 1-2 k$, or so.
One should think. I've tried the iBook, but even with the two-finger
scroll it's not fun. I need a lot of display real estate, which is not 
available in a comfortable position. Books are for trains, beds and bathtubs.

I've tried scanning a few books, but the speed, the quality of the
scan and of the OCR left much to be desired. I think with a device such as
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/02/09/scanner_for_books.html
it would be less painful.

> much easier to search, annotate and archive, and so much easier to
> read in bed or when on the go.  I'm in the process of moving my
> collection of several hundred books from my personal network storage
> onto Amazon S3 this weekend for greater accessibility and backup
> reliability.

Open formats?
 
> Speaking of S3, I am extremely happy with Amazon's S3 and EC2 as
> enabling technologies for scalable small businesses.

The key word here is scalable, otherwise I would find them reasonably
pricey.
 
-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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