What can we do with the eBook reader?
I just got an Elonex eBook reader today (hey, it is my birthday) - the 511EB - based on Terence Eden’s recommendation (as well as him letting me play with it at PresentationCamp London). It’s a wonderful device. I had dismissed the eBook thing until I got a chance to really see an e-Ink display on Ian Forrester’s Sony Reader. Wonderful idea. And the battery life on these eBook readers is just… woah. All that really seems missing from mine is a text editor. Not for programming or anything - just a way of bashing out the odd note using the little fiddly QWERTY keyboard.
I can see myself using this in so many places where laptops are impractical: all forms of public transport, really. I got mine not so much for reading novels off, but to read philosophy papers (I have amassed quite a few over the last few years), to carry around large quantities of reference material (specifications, manuals and the like), to have all my old papers on (“what did I think about this last time?”). Basically an iPod for all the literary clutter I have in my life. If I can also coax myself into reading Dostoevsky while being frequently disappointed at the inefficiency of the British transport system, that’s fine too.
Anyway, I was riffing about what I could do with this. You know how it is with us geeks. You buy an ordinary person an eBook reader and they’ll put eBooks on it and read them. You buy a geek an eBook reader and they will figure out fun and silly things to do with it.
First thing first: I reckon I need to get rsync set up to sync this thing. My views on iTunes/iPod are well known, and my views on the “just drag files to-and-fro” crowd are even better known. I’m not that guy. Anyway, yeah, rsync or whatever. Plug it in, execute sync script and all the relevant changes get shoved into the right place.
Once that is done though, I’m thinking what sort of clever things we might be able to do with these cheapy eBook readers.
Here is my not-particularly-imaginative idea: personal briefings. Like how President Obama gets a big folder full of stuff each morning to read. But for people without their finger on the nuclear trigger. If you edit a wiki like Wikipedia or Citizendium, how about having watchlist changes compiled into one long document and loaded onto the reader. Show “what has changed to the pages I care about this week”.
Why not the same with software? Compile all the documentation for software projects we work on: that means run the unit tests, run the coverage checker, get statistics out of your version control, compile JavaDoc/RDoc/scaladoc/xDoc (like xUnit?) style documentation from the source code, pull down all the open issues in the bug tracker. Load all that into one big document. Put it on the reader.
TV schedules for the week.
Why not just use Google Reader or a web browser? The great thing about the eBook reader is that it gives you a bit of contemplative space to read your documents. You can’t just click on into Facebook. Single context. Read it or turn it off. All this information we deal with on a daily basis - it can be repurposed slightly and we can think about it. Like how older people print stuff out, right? Heh.
Anyway. Over and out. Gotta go eat a veggie burger.
