I think the touch-sensitive screens will win out an in the medium – rather than the long – term. There is a lot of interesting research going on that requires touch screen technology.

I am talking multitouch screens as shown at last Wired’s NextFest (among many other touch-based interfaces). I have also seen some research into tabletop games that use touch-screen instead of the board. Even current infatuation with interactive maps is a push to have those interfaces available as a standalone touch-screen based interfaces.

And projects like ReadUp (thank you for the link) may have some impact too. Especially, if they are released as open-source libraries that other people could incorporate into their own projects.

…schoolchildren are learning to “keyboard” and “text” rather than to write with a pen, so there’s an interesting skills transfer issue as well.

See this discussion, which points to this article in the Washington Post.

…laptops are not as comfortable to hold as a book (angled screen, weight, etc), there is no easy way to mark text with a pen/pencil and/or there is no easy way to flip between two/three sections of text for comparison or . The first two items might become less relevant once TabletPCs become more standard.

Don’t hold your breath while waiting for that to happen .

I love my somewhat antique Toshiba M200 tablet-PC (except that it runs Windows, and I suppose it could be a pound lighter), and using it with ReadUp fixes the last two items on your list. But tablet PC’s in general don’t seem to have caught on. Most people apparently aren’t willing to pay the premium for the built-in touch screen.

A built in dictionary is a valid request i’ve heard before, especially one which can be supplemented with dicts for other languages (then again, electronic dicts like those popular in Japan, Korea, etc are $350 and up).

http://www.engadget.com/2006/09/26/sony-reader-prs-500-gets-launch-date-price/comments/2257049/

Thanks,
David

To Peter (lindemaximilian):
The answer is in two parts. I don’t remember about MobiPocket, but at least some of the readers have API for external dictionaries such as Ultralingua and Slovoed. At least one of those plugin dictionaries may have been normalising conjugations and inflections to the base forms on the lookup.

The other option, and the option I really had in mind, is to do heavy computer processing on the server to make sure that _every_ word (and possibly even colloquialism) is available in the dictionary. This kind of processing is the ‘technical secret sauce’ that can be provided by the technics from the Computational Linguistics area of research.

To Robert Nagle:
You point about the computer games is valid and I agree with it on many levels, but it would need another post to give it justice. If you blog it with details on your site, I will link to it.

When I studied German back in the last century, most of our advanced classes were textual analyses of Schiller, Novalis, etc. I actually loved that, but the other students in the class were easily bored. Looking back, it did not seem to be a very efficient way to improve language fluency. Other tools: nowadays it’s fairly easy to turn on DVD subtitles. If this could be combined with some sort of testing to measure review/reflection, it could be an effective way of improving language skills.

The idea of a dictionary specific to a text is great; i can’t tell you how cumbersome it was to look something up in a foreign language dictionary (which usually was falling apart after so many lookups).

The idea of an Alice-type languagebot would also be great.

Dave, do you know if Sony Reader lets you load a dictionary?