Books Aren't Dead - Think about future of this device and Knowledge Management

jason.averbook — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 03:14:34 GMT

Newsweek drills into detail on the latest from Jeff Bezos and Amazon called the Kindle.

Great quote : "Technology is anything that was invented after you were born"

A few highlights from article:

Some of those features have been available on previous e-book devices,
           notably the Sony Reader. The Kindle's real breakthrough springs from a
           feature that its predecessors never offered: wireless connectivity, via
           a system called Whispernet. (It's based on the EVDO broadband service
           offered by cell-phone carriers, allowing it to work anywhere, not just
           Wi-Fi hotspots.) As a result, says Bezos, "This isn't a device, it's a
           service."
"There's 550 years of technological development in the book, and it's
           all designed to work with the four to five inches from the front of the
           eye to the part of the brain that does the processing " says Hill, a boisterous man who wears a kilt to a
           seafood restaurant in Seattle where he stages an impromptu lecture on
           his theory. "This is a high-resolution scanning machine," he
           says, pointing to the front of his head. "It scans five targets a
           second, and moves between targets in only 20 milliseconds. And it does
           this repeatedly for hours and hours and hours." He outlines the
           centuries-long process of optimizing the book to accommodate this
           physiological marvel: the form factor, leading, fonts, justification …
           "We have to take the same care for the screen as we've taken for print."
"The possibility of interaction will redefine authorship," says Peter
           Brantley, executive director of the Digital Library Federation, an
           association of libraries and institutions. Unlike some
           writing-in-public advocates, he doesn't spare the novelists. "Michael
           Chabon will have to rethink how he writes for this medium," he says.
           Brantley envisions wiki-style collaborations where the author, instead
           of being the sole authority, is a "superuser," the lead wolf of a
           creative pack. (Though it's hard to believe that lone storytellers
           won't always be toiling away in some Starbucks with the Wi-Fi turned
           off, emerging afterward with a narrative masterpiece.)
The answer is probably not, and that's why the Kindle matters. "This is
           the most important thing we've ever done," says Jeff Bezos. "It's so
           ambitious to take something as highly evolved as the book and improve
           on it. And maybe even change the way people read." As long as the
           batteries are charged.

Will this change paper based manual and documents forever? Probably not in the next ten years, but after that, I would bank on it. Will our kids still read textbooks in ten years? What will students think when they enter the workplace when they haven't looked at a book?

Once again, e-HR strategy in the 21st century is so important. Most aren't giving the User Interface, Portal, Social Networking, Mobile Device and Accessibility enough credit. Knowledge Infusion helped its first client launch an internal Facebook community last week with many more planned for the next few quarters. Going forward, it isnt the back office software that will drive success, it is the workforce facing tools.

Another infusion of knowledge...

Click here to read fascinating article

Knowledge Infuser

Books Aren't Dead - Think about future of this device and Knowledge Management