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January 9, 2010

Convergence


Will Blio Change the Game for E-Readers? by Jonathan Strickland at Discovery News.

I don't know why, since I have no great desire to own one and the market share is still a sliver of published books, but I keep running across articles like the above for e-readers and keep wondering how they'll play out. I wrote about this a little while back and it got picked up by Scrub-a-Dub-Tub, so it got plenty of wonderful comments. But no one said they were a teacher-librarian who was buying them for their library and had good reasons why. That's what I'm still curious about.

There's definitely "steam in the e-reader engine" as Strickland says, but I think he's right about convergence. I'm seeing those little Flip-type video cameras and small digital cameras and mp3 being merged into super-phones. There's already plenty of apps for e-readers on these phones. I know they don't have the pleasing "e-ink" look to them (and subsequent plentiful battery life) but when they're telling you to put the charger for these phones next to your bed and "toss out that alarm clock" you know they're becoming more and more ubiquitous. But how much will this have to do with libraries? Makes me wonder.

Of course I still have a bare bones phone, a massive classic ipod and a PowerShot bulging in my pockets right now. So what do I know?

(image cc flickr)