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Cell Phone as e-Book Reader (in Japan)
aussie_a writes "Reading books on your cell phone has become the latest feature in Japan. With games, e-mails and the news already standard features, the Japanese cell-phone is more then just a phone. Novels are downloaded in segments and are run as Java-based applications on the phone. But users can do much more then just read the book, they are able to search for books, write reviews and send fan mail to the authors."
This is how the story lead would appear on a cell phone. Is it good for anything but Haiku?
I think that a mobile phone will have far to small screen. Even if you have a 7" screen, you can't display more than a few lines of text at once! A book has superior resolution, no expiry date, can lend it away and such. I see none of those features on a mobile phone.
The day we can have a a5-sized sheet of e-paper, with a small 20g heavy data module, then maybe can e-books take off. But a book is something everyone know, it's universally, needs nothing but light, and works fine.
Assembling etherkillers for fun an profit
You are on screen 3 of 1,490,548,734 of the Great Gatsby.
*previous page* *next page*
... this is news.
Instead of relying on a screen to visually read the eBook, you already have a built-in private speaker in the earpiece, and could give voice commands to the software to read the next page, resume, go-back, or pause. The only concern then is not to interfere with the phone's ability to take a call, and battery life might be impacted more, but a text-to-speech eBook phone could be the next big thing.
Handsfree would be an asset, as holding the phone up to your ear for that long might be tiring, or if you're stupid enough to drive and use one, cause accidents.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Korean characters are not ideograms, except when they borrow chinese ones for names and hard words. They're phonetic, and a very elegant system it is -- or was, until the inevitable blurring and decay.
They were founded on Confucian principles -- 'male' sounds stick up and 'female' sounds lie passively underneath them. Gotta love that Confucianism @_@
Japanese characters are often ideograms, but to be honest the text is no more than maybe 1.5 times the density of English, for colloquial dialog. I think the key might be that the users are train passengers reading pulp novels, so that:
1 -- there isn't room to open a book
2 -- you don't really need to backtrack and appreciate the structure and rhythm
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
I happen to have a few phone catalogs here. I have just scanned a page on a DoCoMo catalog showing the screens (and font sizes) on the latest phone models.
The image is here. This is a 1Mbyte JPEG file, be warned.
As you can see, this is more than enough to read a book, specially if it's written in Japanese.
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