your point re. google doing a piss poor job at managing appearances is well taken.

i agree w/your assessment of the rocket reader. i was all giddy on first hearing of it. then i saw it. eeeooowww. screen too small. too bulky. and damned ugly. our local public library has several rocket readers that they lend out. rather, that they intended to lend out. no takers. rob.

We computer scientists don’t yet have good theories of interaction and transaction. Without coherent theories, we can’t describe what is happening, and we can’t engineer these systems optimally or manage them well. And yet, in our kiddie steps, computer scientists are ways ahead of people in other disciplines — philosophy, linguistics, economics, political science — who are still focused on theories based on information, not action.

From Grant McCraken:
Google continues to experience rough air as it seeks altitude. We might think that they would have looked at Microsoft before them. Microsoft managed to squander a vast amount of brand equity and brand opportunity by acting lik…

K, thanks, I had a look at the Sony libre (released in Japan only, but available from http://www.dynamism.com to US consumers) and it doesnt appear to have changed since the last time I looked at it. But you’re right something better is coming. But how tragic that this version of the technology should be the creation of Sony, the one corporation that has routinely screwed up the issue of DRM and insisted on treating the consumer as if s/he had made copyright violation a primary life objective. Thanks, Grant

Tom, that Rocket eBook is a good case in point. For me, it does not have the “must hold, must have” quality that is I think the design advantage that sets the adoption process in motion. This is of course Virginia Postrel territory (and perhaps IDEO and some others), but the leading edge of adoption is I think not the “early adopter.” It’s that thing that happens in the head and heart when a would-be adopter when s/her first lays eyes on an iPod. The several barriers that stand between a new technology and wide adoption are as if suddenly punctured. Great design recruits, great design colonizes. And it never seemed to me that the eBook ever made this effort. But yes we should go to TV guide. Thanks, Grant

The problem was timing and software. Why? Because people didn’t want to read novels on an LCD screen (they still don’t). But . . . they’ll certainly read blog posts, sports scores, stock performance, etc. Chunks of information, organized and sent directly to a device, now made possible through RSS technology.

So Grant . . . want to go with me and visit TV Guide and convince them to rebirth and repurpose it? Let me know.

What the [book] industry has to find is its equivalent of iPod. Until we have some sleek, perfect, deeply useful, have to have it, have to hold it piece of technology for reading digital format, this issue (Google vs. Auth…

besides, most academics are illiterate when it comes to copyright. how else can you explain that most academic publishers demand — and academics happly yield — ALL rights? any author worth his/her salt (or at least hopes to make money from their words) knows that copyright is divisible; that the same work can be licensed to several publishers for several applications. a stock photographer would only yield all rights to an image in exchange for mega $$$$$.j

that tirade aside, i agree completely with you that a device that renders dead trees publishing obscelete is long overdue.