Hearing stuff like "
what I have is good enough for me so why should I wish for anything better?" gives me the creeps - it reminds me of that remote ancestor of mine whose mother used to shout from the cave mouth "
Stop playing with those stupid dry sticks of yours and come eat your raw meat before the blood clots!"
Come on boys (and girls)! I may agree that most current e-readers aren't
that bad, but they don't even come near the convenience and the handiness of a good old dead-tree book, their only real advantage being so far that you can squeeze a small library into them.
But you cannot drop them to the ground and step on them, nor can you enjoy full-color illustration with fine details, nor can turn them shortly about to tell a friend the right title, author and publisher of the novel you're reading, nor can you dog-ear the pages you want to go over again later on, nor can you scribble your thoughts on the margins or mark the typos, nor can you thrust them in a knapsack between a bottle and a Swiss-army knife and then hope to read them again...
Sure, you can read on them. But they are too damn delicate, expensive (you have to pay for the e-reader
and for the books) and rough. Moreover (though that can be hardly blamed upon the e-readers themselves) all too often the e-publishers use to turn a blind eye to the typographic quality and the proofreading.
What I would wish and be amenable to pay for? Hmmm, let's see:
- A flexible
e-reader - the whole thing, not just the display. It is technically feasible, if maybe not to the point that one can roll it up and stick it into a bottle.
- A solar-powered device - you need some light to read the e-ink anyway, and with the right electronics the power requirements can be really modest.
- A deployable flexible keyboard to add notes, dog-ears and corrections. Or maybe even to write something of my own, should I feel like it.
- A full-color, hi-res e-ink display. A dream perhaps, but today's dreams are tomorrow's realities - who said that?
- An USB port where I can plug a huge pen-drive with more and more and even more books.
Now, what I would
not need? That's easy:
- no internet, no wi-fi, no E-mail, no social media, no remote interference of any kind. I already have an iPhone for that, and getting it marked the end of my peace.
"Beata solitudo, sola beatitudo" wrote St. Bernard some 1000 years ago - and he didn't even need an iPhone to say so
