My Fellow Taxpayers

What would happen to our collective point of view if we always replaced government with “my fellow taxpayers”? Would anyone go along with it if a politician proposed that “my fellow taxpayers” bailout whichever multibillion dollar industry is failing this week?

This idea comes from an exercise I read about a professor doing at Harvard in “Making the Most of College: Students Speak Their Minds“.

Shelves, Space, and Sticky Fingers

Here I was thinking about ebooks and along come these two informative posts. Go ahead and read them, they’re pretty short and they outline all the major problems with ebooks today:

http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2008/06/its-the-other-s.html

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/06/do-you-own-tree.html

I love books. I’m not much of a collector of anything, except for books. The problem is all the shelves are overflowing. The obvious solution is ebooks of course, but there’s just something about a printed book. The other solution is to just clear out the old books. My wife is good at passing books along; that’s an interesting idea that seems to be going well so far.

Do ebooks work for you? They sort of do for me. Mostly on my Palm. When I purchased my palm awhile back I also picked up the LDS PDA Library for the scriptures and the included iSilo license. Of course that library has a lot of titles included so now I find myself usually reading something on the palm as well as a real book at the same time. This way when I’m home I read the real book and when I’m at the doctor’s office or the auto shop I can read the palm (I can’t include the dentist office anymore, ever since I switched to Dentist Dave they get me in too quickly). I enjoy reading on the palm more than I thought I would. It doesn’t hurt my eyes at all and it’s quick to navigate around. I haven’t really looked into purchasing more ebooks for the palm, but I’m guessing it’s not easy or as cheap as it should be.

For work we have a subscription to Safari Books Online which includes mostly tech books along with a few other categories that interest me like personal development. It’s great for reference purposes, but absolutely horrible to read through a book. It works by allowing you so many slots on a bookshelf (based on your subscription level), I have 5 slots and some books take up more than one slot. Once you place a book on your shelf you can’t remove it for 30 days. You can search your books and add bookmarks, but it doesn’t remember the last page you had open on the books. This is an astonishing oversight. Especially when every other ebook reader I’ve seen or used can at least do that much. It does have an option to go directly to the last book you had open when logging in, but it simply doesn’t work; no matter how many times you check the box. It also makes it very hard to print out any significant portion of a book. There’s also little support for offline reading.

With all the recent news on touch screen devices and support in Windows 7, the only part that really interests me is that coming out of OLPC. Check out this photo (the device doesn’t exist yet by the way):

This a pretty compelling idea. The OLPC project has come under a lot of fire for not delivering on it’s promise of a $100 machine (the current version is $188), for slow sales, and for OS direction problems (switching from Linux to Windows). But I think they’ve done a good thing by setting a high and worthwhile goal and working hard towards it. The new laptop, the XO-2, will have a major focus on reading. Most of education spending, especially in poor countries, goes towards books. So the idea is be able to buy a $100 or $75 laptop with capacity to hold 500 books instead of buying each book at $20 each. You get all those books plus a full computer geared towards learning and interacting. It’s a great plan and I hope they can pull it off. I also hope it includes a cleaning cloth; I know what things look like after my kids get a hold of them.

Maybe we’ll see the ebook market come around yet, but it sure has been dragging it’s feet.

Read more about the XO-2 here: http://blog.laptopmag.com/first-look-olpc-xo-generation-20