I have been known to comment on them myself. We could be wrong! We will certainly not expect the changes to libraries that the iDog will bring.
If I haven't mentioned it before the iDog is a mobile/broadband phone that is under development by Buddhist Pizza Industries. It doubles as a text and A/V processing unit which comfortably uses electronic paper to display books, periodicals, and newspapers (remember them?) at any ambient light level. It can of course project, via a wireless link, onto an iWall (do I have to explain everything?) I thought the incorporation of the audio switch to enable the text to be read by the iDog in a range of voices from Juliet Stevenson to John Humphries (desending order) was a nice touch.
I can just see one of my nieces explaining to her grandchildren, wide mouthed in disbelief, about libraries and books.
Your uncle was a jolly old soul and in his later years he used to borrow a lot of books from the library. Yes, Kirsten, you remember seeing on VID all those books behind the glass wall in the British Library, well there was a library in the village next to where your uncle lived. He would look up the library catalogue on his computer, you don't need to know what one of those is dear, and order the book that he wanted to read. The library would send him an email, it's like a long text dear, to say he could collect the book, read it and return it for another reader in three weeks. He could have it for longer than three weeks if no one else wanted to borrow it. Yes, Jan, I think he was a veeery slow reader......
Who knows what will happen to books, journalism, publishing, copyright, etc....
What will that do to libraries? What will that do to us?
