Why e-books are bound to fail

Why e-books are bound to fail. – ComputerWorld.com

The author of this article believes that the reason e-books is because people LIKE books – they like the paper, the feel, the smell, etc.  Maybe that is so for many people, but I believe that as we move forward as a society, that “love” would go diminish.  My daughter likes to read.  She’s happy to read on a PC, a phone or a PDA. Its all a matter of what you grew up with and are comfortable with.  Don’t get me wrong – books have many advantages over e-books.  You never run out of battery and they’re easy to read in bright light.  But storage and ease of use in many situations is certainly a down-side.

I believe the biggest problem with e-Books is the lack of a standard format. eReader.com has a great library with easy to use digital rights management, but certainly doesn’t have the library that exists in Amazon.  I can’t find some of my favorite authors right now in electronic form.  To me, this is inexcusable, since we know all books exist in electronic form back at the publishers.  Make them available, AT A LESSER PRICE than paper books and I believe you’ll see a much bigger up-take in e-books.

What are your opinions about e-books?  Have you used them?  What was your experience with them?  Love to hear from you.

Texting Makes You Dumb? – I don’t think so…

Coolsmartphone.com has the article (http://www.coolsmartphone.com/news3207.html) that talks about the decline of standards in writing and State Examinations Commission in
Ireland feels that it is being caused by texting.  I’ll admit that texting entices you to make short-cuts in your messages, but to claim it lowers our standards of writing is stretching it WAY out.

Technology in general has made it possible to be more “lazy” (and I use that term very loosely), but I don’t believe it lowers our standards. WE, as in the universal, collective WE, lower our own standards by not enforcing those standards. Spell checkers have allowed us to become less adept at spelling by not having to remember how to spell many words, but having a spell checker doesn’t force us to tolerate spelling mistakes.  There is a person I have worked with in the past who would write emails that you had to read 3 or 4 times just to understand what they were saying.  Mis-spelled words, grammatical errors, missing punctuation – you name it, his emails had it.  Is that caused by technology?  NO!  It was a result of people allowing this high-level manager to continue to write in this way without calling him on the carpet and demanding that he improve his communication skills.  By the way, this person is over 45 years old, so while I don’t know what his excuse is, it certainly isn’t texting.

The same applies to our youth of today.  If we do not tolerate poor communication as a society, then our children will rise to the standard. No more excuses. 

Wireless Banking Still Has A Way To Go…

After reading this article this afternoon  (http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=businessNews&storyid=2007-03-27T105757Z_01_N27407931_RTRUKOC_0_US-CINGULAR-BANKING.xml), I felt compelled to chime in with my two cents.  My take on this?  Boring!  Snooze-City!

While I realize that this is only a step (a baby step), I think Cingular isn’t even heading in the right direction.  Pay my bills from my phone?  I don’t think so – certainly not unless I’ve already got the vendor set up in the system and just need to tell it how much to pay.  Check my balance?  That’s not a bad idea, but why can’t I just send a text message and get it back, like I can get the weather forecast?

 For me, the real opportunity is for the cell phone to replace the credit card and ATM card. Let me wave my phone over a reader, maybe even use my phone as the keypad to enter a PIN to authorize the purchase and even better – have it make a record of the purchase in a personal finance package that can sych up with a program on my PC!  Other countries have this capability and its time it made its way here to the US!

UPDATE: Now THIS (http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9015140&source=rss_topic15) is what I’m talking about!  Cell phone manufacturers need to get on the stick and get these devices out and the application developers need to develop the application for ALL cell phone OSs – especially the smartphone operating systems from Nokia, RIM and Microsoft!