Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
Whatever for? No one has created a magnetic stripe card reader for PCs because nothing is provided on those cards you need to read on a PC.
I don't know offhand what the capacity of one of those stripes is, but I suspect it's too small for any application we have in mind.
And you still have the question of what creates the cards.
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If a card could hold just a few megabytes of data, it would be enough to put an e-book on (or, for that matter, a reader). And even if a magnetic stripe could not hold that much, there are other embedded memory technologies that might do better. Point is, not every memory system has to be huge... there is room for small memory-capacity devices. Just don't use large capacity devices for small memory, then throw them away.
(Suppose a card held a book, and could be read on a device it was inserted into, but not copied? Even publishers could get behind that, because it would prevent most copy-theft. That's something that could catch on.)
Anyway, I do not think hardware is much of a problem at this point. There are enough choices to render it a non-friction issue for most people (you like Sony's reader, she likes the Iliad, I like my PDA, he uses his laptop). And as I've stressed before, people get used to what they want to get used to. If they want e-books, they'll get used to reading them on some hardware or other. Not that hardware won't get better, but I do not believe it's holding anyone back except the really, really picky reader.
The high-friction point is still awareness, or lack thereof.