Let me whisper to you a heresy: ebooks may be aesthetically superior to paper books. There, I’ve said it. Before they come for me, to burn me as a witch, let me try to explain what I mean. First I would like to distinguish two different functional components of the paper book: the paper book as machine and the paper book as a (complex) surface that bears text. Though it is the latter that concerns …
I have been following the rumours of Apple’s tablet device with interest. I have been a Mac user since 1984 and, for a long time, I ‘supported’ Apple the way some people support football teams. Of course, once they went mainstream with the iPod, my fervour cooled a little *grin*. However, and in spite of them being just another evil corporation, there is something of a ‘vision thing’ that goes on at Apple that I …
Google are potentially manoeuvring in a way that may make them the next Microsoft… that said, they tend to champion open standards (perhaps because they don’t need to control through proprietary formats, being as they aim to control the whole Web *wry grin*) – and I’m all for those. So I cautiously welcome the announcement that with Google Editions they’re going to compete with Amazon’s Kindle – that is a closed system and has already …
