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  • Suspended Animation

    • 8 out of 10
    • Fantomas
    • Mike Patton may well be one of the hardest working men in showbiz these days, and his latest with Fantômas underscores just about how far out he is willing to travel.

      Suspended Animation

  • Mystics Anonymous

    • 8 out of 10
    • Mystics Anonymous
    • Mystics Anonymous is the brainchild project of Jeff Steblea, a fantastic songwriter and good friend of mine, as well. In fact, I even played the drums on all but one of the tracks on this album. Jef
  • Go Away White

    • 10 out of 10
    • Bauhaus
    • Go Away White is an album I've been waiting more than 20 years to hear, and the good news is that it was worth the wait.  The latest -- and last, no...for real this time -- album from

  • Kind of Blue

    • 10 out of 10
    • Miles Davis
    • The jazz album to end all jazz albums. Miles Davis and John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderly and the list goes on. The who's who of who's who in jazz have assembled for this monumental record. Get this
  • The Dresden Dolls

    • 10 out of 10
    • The Dresden Dolls
    • The energetic duet of Amanda Palmer and Brian Viglione that make up the Dresden Dolls have created a wonderfully haunting sound in their self-titled album. They have been able to construct an imme

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Just a Peek

The iPod/iPhone/eBook Connection

Everybody’s talking about iPhone: what it will do, what it won’t do, and is it worth the cost. I’ve even speculated on what might be in store for iPhone users.

One thing that some people still don’t seem to understand is that, like the iPod, the iPhone is platform, a handheld computer, if you will, that just happens to let you make calls.

But that’s not what I want to talk about, there more than enough media coverage on this device, so I really can’t add anything significant.

What I want to talk about are eBooks.

I’ll wait until you’re done yawning.

There’s an article that appeared about a year ago over at Engadget that claimed to have inside info that Apple is thinking about entering the eBook market. Yawn again if you’d like. A year has come and gone and there hasn’t been a peep out of Apple about eBook readers.

To me the idea has merit, but truth be told I yawn whenever someone mentions eBook in the same sentence as iPod - that is until I saw this eBook Reader Design Proposal out on YouTube.

Dock an iPod loaded with eBooks on the back, open it to read the ePaper bounded inside. Pretty good idea.

Now this is an eye opener. The idea is a solid one; use the iPod as the brains that docks with an ePaper based eBook reader. The infrastructure for finding and downloading eBooks is already available in the iPod and iTunes Store. If the iPod had tons of storage, you could conceivably carry your entire library with you on vacation, which, of course, you can do now, but with this idea, you might actually read something.

What is also interesting in that there may finally be a way to electronically get periodicals to subscribers that rival print. In fact, with an ePaper text reader, nearly anything, be it handwritten or typed, can be transmitted, downloaded, stored, and ultimately read in almost the same manner as paper documents.

Also, as ePaper finds more widespread use the cost of producing the it will fall, which means that it may be possible to put entire collections of important books in the hands of those who can least afford them. Basically, I’m saying that every kid could have an entire set of encyclopedias, the latest text books, and the best learning tools available to him or her regardless of their social or economic standing. Backpacks would shrink dramatically, much to the jubilation of every kid in America.

The down side? There are some.

While ePaper comes the closest yet to printed paper it still requires power, albeit very little power, to be used. ePaper can’t show color photos or any multicolored image yet. ePaper displays can’t change fast enough for quality animation, so forget about watching movies. And this is still just speculation. Steve Jobs has yet to lay this one on us much less hinted that Apple is even thinking about such a thing.

Beyond that I really can’t think of any show stoppers. Actually, with the impending release of the iPhone there’s even more reasons to hope that Apple takes a serious look at this proposal: Internet access from anywhere.

Along with being able to dock with the ePaper device I would propose that it be Bluetooth capable so that it can link to an iPhone. You could leave your iPhone in your pocket or take calls and still read documents from the Internet, even Web pages. It seems a perfect match.

The only other thing I would add to this proposal is a way to write on ePaper and have the results stored in your iPod. That would complete the circle and in many cases eliminate the need for regular paper.

This eBook Reader Design Proposal is a good idea and I hope someone at Apple takes this seriously. This is an idea that might actually work.


Vern Seward is a writer who currently lives in Orlando, FL. He’s been a Mac fan since Atari Computers folded, but has worked with computers of nearly every type for 20 years.

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