🚀 go-pugleaf

A suggestion for a new product - an electronic paperback.

The device consists of a palmtop computer about the size of a paperback book.
It has a touch-sensitive display or a stylus interface, and is equipped with 
a spread-spectrum radio link to a nearby base station. It is water-resistant, 
and has low power comsumption, using long-life batteries. It has a 
high-quality graphics display and possibly a built-in speaker or earphone 
jack.

The purpose of this device is to let me read a World-Wide-Web type multimedia
document in the bath, one of the last great bastions of old-fashioned paper.

As the cost of a paperback is now about six times the cost of storing a copy 
on disk, to say nothing of the cost of sharing a non-copyright document among 
many users, I think it inevitable that a device like this will take over most 
functions of regular books.

Astute readers will notice a certain similarity to the Hitchhiker's Guide to 
the Galaxy, in the book of the same name by Douglas Adams (which 
automatically updated itself over the Sub-Etha Net), or to the pocket 
computers in The Mote in God's Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.

-- 
</pre><p><address>  Andrew Daviel, Vancouver, Canada (advax@triumf.ca) <p>
<a href="http://sundae.triumf.ca/~andrew"> Andrew Daviel</a>, <a
href="http://www.triumf.ca"> TRIUMF </a>  - home of the world's largest
cyclotron<p> </address><img src="http://sundae.triumf.ca/~andrew/sig2t.gif"
alt=".sig">