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

[Jef Allbright]

On 3/3/07, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:

> 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.

On my VAIO Tx750 it's just fine as PDF.  On my Palm T3 it's quite
acceptable as RTF or plain text.  1GB on the Palm means a nice
collection of reading and reference material wherever I go.

The scanning IS a lot of manual work, since I'm back to using my
personal HP scanner with sheet feeder.  Note that I almost always cut
and feed the pages, rather than do page flipping one or two pages at a
time.  OCR is usually good enough that I don't have to do spelling
corrections.

> Open formats?

Well kinda open, as in PDF.


> > 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.

Yup.  The really nice thing is I can add or shut down servers very
quickly as needed.

- Jef