Well here we are in the year 2006 and well I remember the hype of the late 1990s when the “paperless office” was the next big thing! (Dont get me started on that web 2.0 nonsense). Towards the end of the decade every one was getting scanners and it seemed a certainty that in a short time everything you would ever need would be available electronically.

Now, everyone who remembers these years will no doubt remember the “joy” of 28.8k dial up modems and internet access that was billed by the minute. However, this did little to deter the online pundits from proclaiming that books were dead and the future was online.

Now, fast forward to today and what do we have?

Has anything changed?

Not really, no. High speed internet connections are almost commonplace. Almost everyone who isnt a luddite or lives in a remote hill farm community has access to upstream speeds of around 8 meg. Amazing. Despite all this, has anything really changed?

Well, MP3 has obviously made its mark. If you listen to the record companies the file sharing demons are destroying the music industry (this has the potential to be come a major off topic rant so I will drop this here) and most people in the developed world have at least 1 mp3 track. Its a good bet that everyone in the west, under the age of 20 owns an MP3 player of some description (phone, iPod etc).

This says to me, that the predicted uptakes of MP3 was spot on. It is great. Instead of a crackly old Walkman with 60 minutes of music on, now we have iPods with 20gb of data (around a millions years worth of music isnt it?). How great is that. Now we can have more songs on an MP3 player than we have time left alive to listen to it!

Anyway, dragging this back on topic.

My question is, why havent we done the same for books? While I have no real “love” of Adobe, the PDF format is great. Even if you hate them you can get millions of books in .lit or .djvu either free or paid for. Almost all new software has its manuals as PDF, magazines give away their back issues as PDF. What a fantastic electronic world we live in.

Except it isnt.

I can listen to my MP3 player on the bus, on the train, on the toilet, in bed, in the gym, ANYWHERE. Yet when it comes to PDF files I am tied to my PC or at best the laptop. The laptop is handy, however its hot, heavy and eats batteries like a demon. Imagine being forced to listen to MP3 like that.

Why on Earth, can’t I walk into a high street retailer and buy a sensible sized eBook reader? Surely its not so hard. I am not talking about a mini thing the size of a watch either, it needs a readable screen. The size of a paperback is excellent for reading, so why not have something about the same size, mostly screen, which lets you read PDFs where ever you are?

Does something like this exist? If so, it needs to be marketed better. If it doesnt exist, then the idea is now my copyright. If anyone wishes to explore developing this let me know. 🙂 I am sure, using something like a transmeta chip, linux and basic text readers / PDF readers this could be a device for under £150. Volume will make it even cheaper.

Can anyone think of anything wrong with this idea?