0

By David Rothman

SophieOver at if:book, the blog for Sophie and other projects of the Institute for the Future of the Book, Ben Vershbow has written a nice follow-up to my posts on the idea of massive caching for networked books.

The world beyond WiFi range

To review the issues here, it’s great for an e-book to link to others and to pick up still images, videos and audio and the rest. But what do you do when you’re away from WiFi? Don’t you want material beyond what the original e-book file came with? Caching technology can help make this possible and along the way speed up repeat accesses even when you are online. Please note that Sophie already comes with some caching capabilities.

An important “duh” for networked books

Yes, this is a “duh” kind of thing, as as been observed on one list (no patent applied for!)—but it’s an issue that truly needs to be addressed head-on, now that technologies such as Google Gears and Adobe Apollo are popping up. It’s a basic, a little analogous to e-book ergonomics. The rest won’t happen unless we worry about the supposedly obvious details. Networked books will be more attractive if you can enjoy them on mobile devices in a variety of locations. While the devices are underpowered now, let’s look ahead.

The OLPC angle

By the way, caching technology could be especially useful in remote locations in developing countries of the kind that One Laptop Per Child is targeting. Imagine the savings in bandwidth, not just reliable access to link targets when you’re beyond the range of the WiFi network. I can also see the concept in use for K-12 computing here in the States in communities where broadband access isn’t common.

One other benefit of caching: Better handling of annotations from a variety of sources, including, in time, the bandwidth-intensive multimedia variety. Let’s hope that the world can come up with cache-friendly annotation standards. In the future, you can bet that annotations will be stored in a variety of locations, and the right caching and related software systems could help detect, update and preserve the annotations. Wouldn’t it be great—a distributed approach that was archive friendly, so libraries and other research-related institutions could easily capture and make sense of the annotations?

More on the library angle: I hope that librarians start talking about this “duh” thing—rather than just waiting to see what e-book-related proprietary solutions pop up from Google, Adobe and the like.

 
0