Tor.com’s Ryan Britt has an interesting piece comparing depictions of the future of literature from various science fiction settings—Asimov’s Foundation series, several generations of Star Trek, Doctor Who’s “Silence in the Library” (which I discussed here), The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the new Battlestar Galactica, and others. In most of these settings, for all that some form of e-books can readily be found, printed books still have their place as well. So if we ignore all the big dystopias, then according to science fiction, it seems the future of books is looking pretty good. But...

A couple of weeks ago, Time Magazine’s Lev Grossman looked at fan fiction: the history of fanfic, the fanfic community, what drives fans to write or read it, and authors’ attitudes toward it. Unlike a lot of fanfic pieces, it takes the time to explore the subject in detail—even if the focus is not necessarily the best. The article is a bit overblown in places (I will admit, I cringed at its contention, “Fan fiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped...

Little changes have unintended consequences. I’m reminded of this every day at my tech support job, where I take calls supporting a prominent retailer’s store brand of HDTVs, Blu-Ray players, Bluetooth equipment, and wireless routers. Most of my work has to do with helping people set up their TVs, and one of the questions I’m most commonly asked is, “How do I get rid of those black bars to the left and right of the picture?” The black bars are, of course, an artifact of the change in aspect ratios. As TVs got wider, older programming has to...

While this is not specifically about e-books, it is about an experience in transitioning from physical to digital media, and it should provide a lesson to all fields that are taking these steps—including books to e-books. A number of movies, especially titles from Paramount or Disney (such as Pixar’s Wall•E), have been coming with an “extra third disc” lately, containing a DRM-girt digital copy which can be transferred either to iTunes or Windows Media Player. This saves the buyer the trouble of ripping the thing, and lets the studio charge a little extra and feel they can keep some...

ZDNet reports that Dell is positioning its new 5” Android-powered Streak device as part of its line of healthcare IT products. Too big to be a smartphone, too small to call a tablet, the Streak nonetheless fits perfectly in a lab coat pocket. Dell promises it will “integrate seamlessly” with its other healthcare products, and has a number of useful features that will make it a handy medical data companion. Doctors have very particular information-technology needs, complicated by HIPAA laws that are very specific about what can be done with patient information. Given that Dell already has a...

I’ve talked about PADDs before, the hand-held touch-sensitive tablet computers used in Star Trek: The Next Generation. I mentioned Jeff Kirvin’s remarks about it in regard to the Palm device that later became the Pre, and subsequently compared my new iPod Touch to the device. Now Ars Technica has interviewed production designers Michael and Denise Okuda and Doug Drexler from TNG as well as design staff from other Star Trek shows about the design process that led to their imagination of the device to which the iPad is only just catching up, 23 years later. It is...

I'm enjoying my first week with the iPad. I'll have more for you later on the specific niches it's filling in my digital life, but first, what am I working with, exactly? What do I plan to do with the iPad and what apps have I bought already? 1) Apps for Reading Books Downloaded iBooks and it's my favourite so far. I love the two-page spread and find it easier to hold the iPad that way. But I do find it more comfortable to read for long stretches on the Kindle---it's not as heavy as the Kindle, has better contrast and the...

Received the following email from reader John Hagewood. Anyone got any insight into this? I purchased many many books from ereader.com from 2000 until 2009, going way back to the palm digital media and peanut press days. For years, they were my favorite seller...loved the format, the reader, and the social DRM. A lot of what I purchased were Star Trek books. I was just revisiting my library there today via the PC and the iPhone, updating my expired CC and trying to reset my unlock codes. Then I started clicking through from my bookshelf to...

You may recall how Data the android read books in Star Trek: The Next Generation, or the robot Johnny Five in Short Circuit—by riffling through the pages and absorbing the information in the time it took to go from the front to back cover. Now researchers in Tokyo have come up with a system that can scan paper books into electronic form just as fast. The video (embedded below the jump) shows University of Tokyo assistant professor Yoshihiro Watanabe literally holding a book under the camera and riffling through the pages. The monitor captures the images...

What piece of technology most makes you feel like you’re “living in the future”? Laptop Magazine asked a number of speculative-fiction writers that question, including Jeffrey A. Carver, John Scalzi, Charlie Stross, and Tobias Buckell. Interestingly, most of them responded the iPhone (or in Scalzi’s case, the iPod Touch). Jeffrey Carver said, after the Star Trek-inspired nature of his flip-to-open cellphone: My second thought was eBook reader. I love reading on my Sony Reader and also on my Dell PDA, which I keep almost for the sole purpose of using as...