go, go gadget show

A new series of the gadget show started last night. That meant my gradual return to my usual routine reached a bit of a zenith. I pretty much did the same routine last night what I do most every Monday and you know what? It felt kinda good.

I've mentioned before I'm a creature of habit and routine and with all the disruption that's been going on over the last few weeks (if not months) it was just plain nice to do the usual stuff.

The gadget show itself featured a bit on e-readers. E-readers are basically electronic books and for a while now they've been looming about, threatening to do to books the same thing MP3 did to music.

The idea is we ditch all our physical copies of things and we go electronic. You buy e-books via download and then they're stored on the e-book instead.

In a way, it's odd that books are lagging behind in this way. I mean, the vast majority of stuff you do on the internet involves reading, so why weren't books and magazines the first things to make that leap to being e-media?

I think a big part of it is that the other things were taken there by piracy. Music especially involves fairly small files that you can move about easily and there are loads of programs available for ripping CDs, etc. Books, how much of a pain in the arse would it be scanning in all the pages? I mean, I can't be arsed to scan a few magazines, imagine doing all the pages in all the books I own.

Another problem is that staring at small LED screens is tiring on the eyes. They're also very power hungry with their backlights. There's this e-ink stuff of course, but then I don't know how much that costs as a technology. Certainly e-readers all seem to be very expensive.

Yes, you're getting the capacity to store thousands of books, but those books also still need to be paid for. And imagine breaking it and loosing all of your books? I mean, you could back them up and stuff, I guess, but you couldn't re-sell them as second hand books.

And e-ink doesn't do colour, so that sort of goes against this idea that magazines and newspapers are part of the available content. And what about non-fiction books? And text books? And reference books?

Then you've got to factor in the tactical tactile joy that is reading a book.

I dunno, I'm guessing the day when it all goes digital is inevitable, but I won't be happy when it does.

And to cap it all off, in terms of the gadget show, the e-readers didn't fair very well in the reviews. Even the much-vaunted Amazon Kindle didn't do very well.

Of course the review couldn't look at this new iPad thing from Apple. I think they've kinda shot themselves in the foot with that myself. They've basically produced a tablet PC and given it something called iBooks, which is like iTunes for books.

But the problem is it's big and heavy and uses an LCD screen and so it's a hybrid beast where I think they should have focused more on doing a proper e-Reader and revolutionising that market.

Not that I mind, as I say, because I don't exactly want it to happen any time soon.