Quietly, technology tends to infiltrate our lives and we start to do things differently (and hopefully more efficiently). Some technologies have been referred to as disruptor's because they disrupt the status-quo, or shake up the dominant businesses in a particular industry. Such disruptor's of yesteryear could include the affordable VCR (for releasing the chain to TV scheduling & opening up home movies), the cellular radio (for obvious reasons), and automobile (freeing society from the horse and carriage).
More recently, the iPhone (for its many and growing capabilities), Twitter (for its unique view on communicating to hungry social web-ites) and the e-Book Reader. e-Book Reader, a disruptive technology you say? You are probably wondering to yourself, "what is this guy smoking?" e-Books are neither new (been around since the start of people sharing information via the web. And now there are a plethora of ebook readers. None of them stand out as great tools, due to screen size, color capabilities, or they lack the tactile nature of what people who love books so want. Note my first e-book read on any handheld device was The Underground by Suelette Dryfus. I read this @ 1998, so I'm no Al Gore (he having invented the Internet). So how is the eBook Reader disruptive?
Well, its not the current version of e-Book Readers that are disruptive. Its actually my predictions of whats next for eBook Readers. Its the melding of capabilities of having an electronic version of material that is accessible via a feature rich device that is not just connected to a store-front, but to others who are/have read that same book, similar material and subject matter throughout the world. That's my prediction for Kindle V3, or the iPhone (OS 4) or the Sony eBook Reader (V9). Such capability will change the way we read, share information, learn, work and educate ourselves as well as others around us. That's whats game changing here - its the promise of things to come.
As a start of the revolution, this article in the WSJ begins to speak to just that.
Here Comes the E-Book
By STEVEN JOHNSON
Every genuinely revolutionary technology implants some kind of "aha" moment in your memory -- the moment where you flip a switch and something magical happens, something that tells you in an instant that the rules have changed forever.
The Journal Report
- See the complete Technology report.
I still have vivid memories of many such moments: clicking on my first Web hyperlink in 1994 and instantly transporting to a page hosted on a server in Australia; using Google Earth to zoom in from space directly to the satellite image of my house; watching my 14-month-old master the page-flipping gesture on the iPhone's touch interface.
Read the rest here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123980920727621353.html
