Today’s Wall Street Journal is worth buying (it’s only $ 1.50), especially for Section R, The Journal Report: Highlights From the D: All Things Digital Conference.
The supplement includes an interview with Jeffrey Bezos on why people will read e-books.
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But you also can’t ever out-book the book. You need to look for a series of things that you can do with an electronic device like Kindle that you could never do with a physical book.
Some of them can be pretty simple, like dictionary lookup. I find I don’t know what lots of words mean, and I used to guess because — am I really going to get up off of the sofa and go find a dictionary?
Changing the font size, a very simple thing that’s much appreciated.
And then some whoppers. The big whopper is wireless delivery of books in less than 60 seconds. You don’t have the cognitive overhead of thinking about your monthly wireless bill. You don’t have to know who the wireless carrier is. We’re hiding all of that complexity.
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The supplement also has an article by Lee Gomes on reading books via smart phone, Rupert Murdoch on the future of newspapers, Susan Decker and Jerry Yang on “what is Yahoo, anyway,” and a lot more.
