On Sat, 28 May 2005 16:27:25 -0700, "Alan"
<info@optioncity.REMOVETHIS.net> wrote:

>However, the need to have multiple pages that you can physically
>'turn' seems to me entirely psychological unless I am missing something.
> I don't feel that need at all.

I can assure you that some other people do (I am one), and I suspect
that even more will resist giving up that capability even if they do
not need it.

When I'm reading a book, I often flip back through the last several
pages to compare what I'm reading to something I recently read, review
an important concept being built upon, etc. Sometimes I flip forward
for similar purposes. Sometimes I insert Post-it sheets as bookmarks
in a few places or a few dozen places. All of those things are more
awkward with an e-book, which makes them distracting and makes reading
more difficult. Sometimes I actually need to look at two pages at
once, for example to see a graph or table while reading text that
relates to it, and with an e-book that is simply impossible.

One's experience depends very much on what one is reading, of course.
For fiction or popular nonfiction, these limitations would matter much
less, if they mattered at all. Fiction or popular nonfiction
constitutes the majority of most people's reading. But most people
seem to have no particular interest in using e-books under any
conditions, if they have even noticed that such things exist. Their
motivation to adopt the new technology is limited. They have little
interest in annotating their reading, or in full-text searchability.
The economic advantage of an e-book over a mass-market paperback is
much less compelling than its advantage over an expensive scholarly
work or technical book. Under some conditions the economic advantage
goes the other way. If you go to the beach, for example, which would
you rather risk losing or damaging: a $5 paperback, or a $100 reader
loaded with a $1 electronic novel?

>Yet ... you need to be able to do a search on author, title, keywords, etc.
>I wonder if a requirement that you talk "into the open e-book",
>combined with a few strategically placed pickup microphones, couldn't
>substantially filter out the background? Or, how about a wireless, clip-on
>microphone?...
>Surely the acoustic engineers can solve this little problem.

It's a well-known problem. Plenty of acoustic engineers have worked on
it, and continue to do so. Noise canceling microphones can do
remarkable things, but speech recognition is a very demanding
application, and current technology has significant limitations.
You'll see what I mean if you cruise the Web and look for users'
comments on doing speech recognition with the microphones that are
built into current portable computers. I don't doubt that the
technology will improve, but the improvements are likely to be
incremental and slow.

Natural-language speech recognition is only really practical with a
noise canceling microphone positioned just to the side of the
speaker's mouth (usually on a boom attached to a headset). "Array
microphones" can function at distances of up to a couple of feet, but
they don't work as well, they probably wouldn't fit on a small
portable device, and they typically cost hundreds of dollars.

For limited-vocabulary speech recognition the requirements are more
relaxed, but I don't have a sense of how much so. And in any case, if
you want to use speech recognition to recognize authors' names, search
text, etc., you are no longer talking about a limited vocabulary!

I imagine this type of function being performed by something much
closer to a tablet PC, with handwritten input, communicating with the
bound e-book I described before through some type of wireless
connection.

My email address is LLM041103 at earthlink dot net.