Conference noted::sf

    I read it and had the same reaction: this is already here.  It 
    had some funny jabs at the publishing business, but didn't do a 
    lot of extrapolation.  The main place in which the cyberbook idea 
    falls down is that the quality of screen in any kind of cheap 
    display is lousy at present.  It's much worse than paper.  You 
    wouldn't want to stare at it for hours.  /jlr

    The crucial aspect of the Cyberbook was the ease and low cost of new
    contents. The idea was that ANYONE could afford ANY book, because it
    cost practically nothing to load in the text.
    
    This we don't have. CDs are expensive. RAM/ROM is getting cheap, but
    filling memory over phone lines would take a LONG time and be costly.
    Perhaps we will have CD-based machines at the library: plug in your
    Cyberbook and it receives the new text at 19200 baud. It would
    certainly cut back on overhead at the library: no checking in books, no
    shelving, no fruitless searches because someone else took it out
    already. *I'm* up for it.
    
    Re -? -- the comment on cheap displays: nine years ago I bought an LCD
    laptop with just 40 characters by 8 lines... but they were BIG
    characters and very easy to read. That's another advantage of a
    Cyberbook: if your vision is poor, crank up the size of the character
    set until it's legible!
    
    - Hoyt

    It's pretty hard to beat the cost and quality advantages of paper 
    for pure reading applications.  I'm staring at a $10,000 
    workstation right now, and it doesn't have nearly the quality of image
    of a $4.95 paperback.  Actually printing a paperback 
    costs less than a dollar - all the rest is royalties and marketing.
    The cost of cyberbooks will come down over time, of 
    course, but it's got to come down by four orders of magnitude.
    
    It seems to me that for cyberbooks to catch on they have to do more
    than just display text.  Paper can display text too easily and
    cheaply for cyberbooks to compete. There are lots of other things 
    cyberbooks can do, of course, and the applications have been 
    discussed endlessly among hypertext aficionados.  They can offer 
    radically improved searching (click on this term instead of 
    tracking it through an index), or interactive paths 
    through a story, or live graphics (i.e. graphics beyond illustrations).
    
    What I wonder about, though, is the cost of producing all those other 
    applications.   Every new feature introduced into a book 
    represents more work on someone's part.  A textbook, say, has 
    vastly more work put into it than just the writing of the text.  
    Someone has to do all the page layout, someone has to do all the 
    illustrations,  a whole team of people has to check it for accuracy,
    and so on.  A simple novel might take one or two person-years to 
    produce, but an elaborate work like a textbook probably takes
    many person-years.
    
    If a cyberbook has a lot in it besides the main story line, that 
    extra effort will cost money.  It'll make cyberbooks more expensive
    and mean there are fewer of them.  They'll be more like movies 
    than like novels.  It takes a lot more people to make a movie 
    than it does to write a book because there's a lot more bits there.
    As a result there are thousands on thousands of novels produced a 
    year, and only one or two hundred movies.  In fact, there are more
    SF novels written each year than movies.
    
    What this means that cyberbooks would suffer from the same lack of 
    imagination that we see in movies.  People just don't want to 
    risk serious money on new things, and rightly so.  (Hey, my money 
    isn't in an S&L.)
    
    Of course, there is a crude form of cyberbook already in 
    existence: Nintendo games.  They're available everywhere, they're 
    quite cheap, they exploit the active nature of computers quite well,
    and they're mind-bogglingly repetitious.  The only variety is in 
    the settings and the nature of the enemy.  The only plot line is 
    the quest fantasy.  That's also the plot of unfortunately 
    many SF novels, but it gets tiresome quickly.  If that's all that 
    video games can offer after 15 years of development, then the 
    future of cyberbooks looks dull.
    
    /jlr

    Re .3:
    
    > Nintendo games.  They're available everywhere, they're 
    > quite cheap, . . .
    
    Ha!
    
    > . . . they're mind-bogglingly repetitious.  The only variety is in 
    > the settings and the nature of the enemy.  The only plot line is 
    > the quest fantasy.
    
    While the majority of the market has turned to such repititious
    material, this is not true generally.  There are, if you look for them,
    games with quite a bit of originality.  E.g., there are a number of
    puzzle games -- the player is confronted with a set of objects whose
    properties the player either knows or can determine by experimentation. 
    With these objects, the player must figure out how to accomplish
    certain goals.  These sort of things must require a great deal of
    ingenuity to design, and they also require creative thinking from the
    player.
    
    
    				-- edp

    While 64 kilobit ISDN phone lines may take some of the time out of
    downloading a book, there are a number of other issues that haven't
    been dealt with:
    
    Royalties and such may make the cost of the data be on the order of $4,
    at which point it's more convenient (for me anyway) to buy the
    paperback.
    
    Piracy is a big concern for authors.  I need to be able to buy a
    cyberbook and sell or give it to someone else without keeping a copy. 
    While it's more trouble than it's worth to Xerox a paperback, it's
    trivial to copy computer memory.
    
    Size has to come down to the size of a paperback (with commeasurate
    mass reductions) before I'll buy one.  Even hardcovers are too big to
    put in a pocket or my briefcase.
    
    Display resolution has got to come way up.  300 DPI at a minimum, and
    1200 would be nice.  If it's not as clear as a paperback, it'll bother
    my eyes.
    
    Low price would be a plus.  If I read 50 books a year, and save $1 per
    book, the reader ought to cost on the order of $100 or less.
    
    As someone once remarked when told that he could fit all the books he
    could read in a lifetime on a CDROM and read them off a screen: "You
    could fit all the books I would read off a screen in a lifetime on a
    IBM punchcard."
    
    Willie
    

    I'd like to suggest an experiment. Why doesn't someone type in some
    decent SF novel, say Brin's "Earth", so we can all actually experience
    the advantages of reading a book on screen. 
    
    - Hoyt

    re: .6
    
    There are already a few typed in in the PROSE conference if you really
    want to try it :*).
    
    Cheers!
    
    Charlie

    
    I've had a Sharp ZQ-5200 (sold as Wizard in Seppo land) electronic
    diary since Christmas and love it.
    
    Apple have just announced (in the last few weeks) the "Newton" based on
    the ARM RISC (26 instructions) processor from Acorn.  It too is made by
    Sharp.
    
    William Gibson's latest work is going to be on disk with other
    packaging, and have a virus/worm in it that deletes it after you've
    read it.  Read once fiction.
    
    David

    Re .8:
    
    Charming.  Why would I want a story that was harder to read, more
    expensive, and less durable than a standard paperback?  Talk about user
    unfriendly.
    
    Earl Wajenberg