by Joe Wilkert
Many ebooks can be read just fine on the surface area of your typical Kindle, iPad or other eReader. The reading process flows sequentially from one page to the next. No need to jump back and forth within the book or look things up in an index. Your typical novel is consumed this way, but a how-to book or a reference guide is not; with these latter examples you’re often dipping in and out, jumping to and from the index and sometimes wanting to look at pages that aren’t adjacent to one another.
What Joe is striving for is ubiquitous computing. I'd like to see my e-reader throw definition requests to my desktop, or throw a map of a fantasy world to my TV screen. I'd likely read more non-fiction if I can drive through footnotes to web pages on another screen while still having my current "place" in the book open. Whether its a smartphone or a laptop, desktop, or set-top box, being able to distribute a task among all the smart devices in a room is an essential step in the development of hardware and software that fits into our lives rather than the other way around.
Ubiquitous (or pervasive) computing can move out of the MIT Labs theoretical development into the real world quite easily with some software and hardware tweaks. We all have smartphones, desktop, laptops, and now tablets and e-readers. We just need a mix of Bluetooth and Wifi and some smart software to get everyone to talk nice.
Unfortunately, corporate interests will continue to try to Balkanize the environment to maximize their own profits.
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