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Originally Posted by DiapDealer
Well to be perfectly honest Prestidigitwheeze, I'm basing most of my argument on the thread title that you chose. I really don't think there's a lot of wiggle room for interpretation there.
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That's like saying there isn't any room for romance in a book titled
War and Peace. Or that no one may wear brown in
The Red and the Black.
Predicting the death of dedicated eReaders is metonymic, not literal. Every indication of context in the blog post and in my responses suggests mass market death, which is what Jeter means and certainly what I mean. Given the detritus-swept cultures and worlds Jeter and others write about, I doubt KW means dead as in completely nonexistent.
I'm all for your making the point that old tech never dies completely, but being overly literal isn't really fair to the original idea -- particularly since you seem to be saying that
was the original idea.
In an earlier post, someone made an excellent point I'd intended to make myself: That science fiction isn't usually about absolute predictions of the future so much as it is satirizing the present. That's not only true, it's also something that is often said by its most visible authors.
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Jeter, I'm not really concerned with very much. I was only concerned with several posts in this thread claiming that history supported the theory that multi-purpose devices cause the extinction of single purpose devices.
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Cause extinction in the sense of becoming suffocatingly popular, not in the sense of forbidding any examples of said tech ever to exist again. Again, I'm all for being boolean as long as people recognize it as a fun exercise and not the complete refutation of a more general idea.
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And I don't think history supports that theory at all. Nor do I think I'll see the "death" of the dedicated ereader in my lifetime. If I've missed the point I certainly apologize.
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You're welcome to that opinion and to find ways to express it here. But if history supports your theory rather than Jeter's, then you needn't look for fine-print ways to disprove his -- presumably, history will yield obvious examples. If not, guess what? You needn't justify your ideas and opinions with irrefutable proof -- particularly when we're talking about something that hasn't even happened yet.
What I don't understand is why our interest in eReaders would ever need to be validated by huge numbers and upscale production.
The first real issue I see is possible changes in software or implementation of things our eReaders can't do: When later versions of ePub and mobi guarantee that earlier readers can't open later books -- at which point someone will probably write a conversion application that makes the texts backward-compatible anyway.
No need to apologize, though. You haven't offended me, and if you had, then I'd have to get a teaching job at the School for the Too-Easily Offended.
Here's another argument for you to illustrate with examples, BTW: Multipurpose devices that didn't survive. There are quite a few odd examples of that.