Laer Carroll
January 29th, 2011, 07:58 AM
I dropped by my favorite Barnes & Noble bookstore today. It's in walking distance, has lots of free parking if I'm lazy, and is quite big. It's also right next door to my favorite pizza restaurant, with windows onto a walkway where I can watch lightly clad ladies walk by!
Just inside the entrance is a NOOK display, with a black and white and a color e-reader which you can play with. During high-volume times they have someone behind the counter to help you. Other times the check-out sales people nearby will take time out to come over and help.
I spent a little time with the NOOKcolor. Back home I checked out its technical specs. It is a completely general tablet computer as well as an e-reader. It is less powerful than the iPad, with less memory, processor speed, and so on. But it has standard wireless so can be used wherever you have wireless access.
And it only costs $250.
It uses Google's Android operating system, and application developers use the Java computer language to write computer programs (called apps). Java is a high-level language like C++. Both come with dozens of libraries of code which simplify programming a lot. A fully functioning word processor can thus be built out of a few dozen or a few hundred lines of code.
Not that you would want to. Several such WP programs are available free, including the excellent Word clone (http://www.openoffice.org/product/writer.html) from OpenOffice.org. Nor would you want to use the NOOKcolor to write much. It's virtual Qwerty keyboard is so small you have to use your fingernails to write on it.
What does this mean to us as writers? Lets look at the bigger picture first, and then get back to that.
A couple of weeks ago vendors from all over the world announced more than 100 tablet computers at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Right now most are vaporware, and many likely will never be more than that. But the deluge is near, and by the holiday season this year it will not be unusual for there to be $100 tablet computers available in the millions. They will have many shapes and sizes and capabilities.
And almost all will be general-purpose computers as well as special-purpose devices.
Many of them are likely to have docking stations like that of the iPad, which lets you attach a large keyboard to it. Some may well have outputs that can attach to your TV set or other display device - such as those digital picture frames you can now buy for a few dozen dollars.
Result - really cheap computers ever more available. Computers spilling out of the richer nations to the less rich and from there to the not-at-all-rich nations. A flood of computing and communication power.
A slow flood. More like a mud-slide. There's more to a revolution of this dimension than just the basic hardware and software parts. There is peopleware changes. Such as increased literacy in the less-literate parts of the world. And anti-progress forces such as the Taliban and the religion-only-or-die schools in the Muslim world.
Back to writers. This means more paths to publication than just the conventional ones. We've had much discussion in this and similar forums of this. And all of those are relevant. So back to your keyboards, ladies and gentlemen. The world is ever more open to you. But you've got to produce, or it will pass you by.
Just inside the entrance is a NOOK display, with a black and white and a color e-reader which you can play with. During high-volume times they have someone behind the counter to help you. Other times the check-out sales people nearby will take time out to come over and help.
I spent a little time with the NOOKcolor. Back home I checked out its technical specs. It is a completely general tablet computer as well as an e-reader. It is less powerful than the iPad, with less memory, processor speed, and so on. But it has standard wireless so can be used wherever you have wireless access.
And it only costs $250.
It uses Google's Android operating system, and application developers use the Java computer language to write computer programs (called apps). Java is a high-level language like C++. Both come with dozens of libraries of code which simplify programming a lot. A fully functioning word processor can thus be built out of a few dozen or a few hundred lines of code.
Not that you would want to. Several such WP programs are available free, including the excellent Word clone (http://www.openoffice.org/product/writer.html) from OpenOffice.org. Nor would you want to use the NOOKcolor to write much. It's virtual Qwerty keyboard is so small you have to use your fingernails to write on it.
What does this mean to us as writers? Lets look at the bigger picture first, and then get back to that.
A couple of weeks ago vendors from all over the world announced more than 100 tablet computers at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Right now most are vaporware, and many likely will never be more than that. But the deluge is near, and by the holiday season this year it will not be unusual for there to be $100 tablet computers available in the millions. They will have many shapes and sizes and capabilities.
And almost all will be general-purpose computers as well as special-purpose devices.
Many of them are likely to have docking stations like that of the iPad, which lets you attach a large keyboard to it. Some may well have outputs that can attach to your TV set or other display device - such as those digital picture frames you can now buy for a few dozen dollars.
Result - really cheap computers ever more available. Computers spilling out of the richer nations to the less rich and from there to the not-at-all-rich nations. A flood of computing and communication power.
A slow flood. More like a mud-slide. There's more to a revolution of this dimension than just the basic hardware and software parts. There is peopleware changes. Such as increased literacy in the less-literate parts of the world. And anti-progress forces such as the Taliban and the religion-only-or-die schools in the Muslim world.
Back to writers. This means more paths to publication than just the conventional ones. We've had much discussion in this and similar forums of this. And all of those are relevant. So back to your keyboards, ladies and gentlemen. The world is ever more open to you. But you've got to produce, or it will pass you by.