Quote:
Originally Posted by barryem
My hope is that ereaders in 10 years will be a lot like they are today.
|
All today's hardware models with replaceable batteries (often
only slightly difficult to replace) should still be available, used, ten years from now.
Will I be able to take one almost anywhere in the world, and, in a pinch, send an email -- as I can do with my Kindle Keyboard today? I'm guessing no -- Amazon will turn that off at some point and/or the cell phone networks will no longer support the hardware.
Will
what I consider the killer eInk app in the United States still be available then? I'm again guessing -- No.
Will new books still load on the old readers? Maybe. In the eInk Kindle world, it depends on Amazon support decisions.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DaleDe
I think foldable screens are a distinct possibility with tablets going away due to the convenience of the smaller footprint. I hear Microsoft is working on this as we speak.
|
I've been hearing about this, or similar, for, I'd guess, twenty plus years. Newspapers were supposed to be, by now, on a large-screen light-weight flexible device. Instead, the big newspaper change was getting killed by free news on the Internet. The future is hard to predict!
I've predicted before that paper books would be replaced by single-title readers much cheaper to produce than a hardback. People here don't like that idea. Whether it happens may depends less on whether people like the idea, and more on whether techniques to manufacture a book like I describe, extremely cheaply, are actually invented.