Bubble Bursts for e-Books

Reuters has a piece noting that ebooks haven't lived up to the hype. Give it a few years, and publishers willing to issue non-DRM ebooks, and reading devices that go for days without being recharged and are as light as a paperback, and then we'll see...

Comments

More like give it a few years and 5MP cams

[ahfoo]

will make it irrelevant.
Nobody is going to scan a book on a flatbed scanner. It's just not convenient. But OCR works great with a nice fat TIFF file taken instantly with a camera.
I've tried it and it works even with a one megapixel camera if you use a book with nice big print. It works, but the accuracy is about 70 percent and with small text like a magazing it drops to about twenty percent.
With a three megapixel things get much better. Go ahead and try it, but remember not to send a jpeg to the OCR. If it isn't TIFF, the OCR will probably ignore it. At least mine did and I understand most of them are based on one or two SDKs.
But at five megapixel, it's game over. As fast as you can turn the pages you can scan it to OCR. I think magazines are going to be blind sided by this even more than books.
These things are already in the consumer market, they're just a bit pricey, but I know from reading the industry rags that almost all the DSCs come from Taiwan these days and in the next generation we can expect 5MP even in the cheap no brand models.
And then you have the storage issue with those massive TIFF files you're clicking away at. No problem. The Sony Mavica started with a floppy, now they use mini-CDs. So how much you want to bet we're going to see mini-DVD format coming up real quick.
Sell those media stocks kids.

Re:One solution to the eBook popularity

[Carmody]

you.
are.
brilliant.