Weird Observation

[Admiral James Kirk]

I was downloading an eBook the other day when I recalled something from Margaret Wander Bannano's novel Strangers from the Sky. In it Dr. McCoy recommends the titular novel SftS to Admiral Kirk. After some hard selling from Bones Kirk decides to buy it. He has the option of either getting the classic hard copy or getting it as a computer file. He goes for the hard copy but...

I remember being a twelve year old kid all the way back in 1987 thinking about how amazing it would be to read a book that way. To not have the paper and the print and just read it off some screen. It seemed weird and futuristic and I never for a minute believed such a thing would ever happen and now...

I do it very friggin' regularly! I'm living in the future! I'm really enjoying the things our toys can do for us but...

How long ago were eBooks conceived? I mean they seem fairly recent. I downloaded my first one a decade ago but was there any real talk about them in 87? Computers and the internet were around but in vastly more primitive form. Still it occurs to me that maybe some crafty editor or publisher might have come up with the idea of selling books on floppy disk to the nerd crowd.

Any truth to that theory or was the whole eBook thing just clever extrapolation on Margaret's part?

 

[Christopher]

^Well, the concept that people in the future would read books as some sort of electronic file, or would give up books altogether in favor of television or more advanced visual media, has been around in science fiction for generations. Heck, look at "Court-martial," where Sam Cogley's fondness for hardcopy books is presented as a quaint, atavistic habit. Or even earlier, in "Where No Man Has Gone Before," where Gary Mitchell was reading poetry and textbooks on the monitor screen next to his sickbay bed. And I'm sure there are plenty of earlier examples in prose SF. I'm pretty sure a lot of Asimov novels set in the far future had people reading books in the form of data tapes rather than paper.

 

[rfmcdpei]

^Well, the concept that people in the future would read books as some sort of electronic file, or would give up books altogether in favor of television or more advanced visual media, has been around in science fiction for generations. Heck, look at "Court-martial," where Sam Cogley's fondness for hardcopy books is presented as a quaint, atavistic habit. Or even earlier, in "Where No Man Has Gone Before," where Gary Mitchell was reading poetry and textbooks on the monitor screen next to his sickbay bed. And I'm sure there are plenty of earlier examples in prose SF. I'm pretty sure a lot of Asimov novels set in the far future had people reading books in the form of data tapes rather than paper.

Heh, tapes.

Last year I re-read Diane Duane's 1990 novel Doctor's Orders. It's a great novel in her own style still, don't worry, but it reveals its age in only a single short passage delivered, in passing, in Kirk's pre-mission briefing of his officers.

Starfleet has kindly used this short layover to install an extra eighty terabytes of storage in the Library computers. I want to come home with that memory full, ladies and gentlemen. Be advised (26).

The passage stood out for me when I re-read Doctor's Orders because I had shortly before bought a one-gigabyte memory chip for my camera for $C20. Considering likely further advances in the technology, when I mentioned the passage to a friend of mine he joked that the admiralty gave Kirk a thumb drive that they found sealed in a box of cereal.

 

[Steve Roby]

Duane's novel Spock's World came out just a few months after I started working at a satellite communications company library. I was organizing technical documents from the CCIR and CCITT, and we had a lot of IEEE journals and standards, so I was tickled during a scene in Spock's World where someone says "signal loss within CCITT and IEEE parameters." And a few years later CCIR and CCITT were renamed ITU-R and ITU-T. Alas.

 

[ATimson]

Last year I re-read Diane Duane's 1990 novel Doctor's Orders. It's a great novel in her own style still, don't worry, but it reveals its age in only a single short passage delivered, in passing, in Kirk's pre-mission briefing of his officers.

Starfleet has kindly used this short layover to install an extra eighty terabytes of storage in the Library computers. I want to come home with that memory full, ladies and gentlemen. Be advised (26).

The passage stood out for me when I re-read Doctor's Orders because I had shortly before bought a one-gigabyte memory chip for my camera for $C20. Considering likely further advances in the technology, when I mentioned the passage to a friend of mine he joked that the admiralty gave Kirk a thumb drive that they found sealed in a box of cereal.

At least that was on the order of terabytes. Mike Stackpole's Battletech novels have them using 650 MB optical disks in the year 3025.

 

[captcalhoun]

when i wrote my OU stories set in 20+ years from now, i was very careful to avoid mention of memory media, i think i just called a 'data stick' or a 'data card' or some such vagueness to avoid that kind of thing.

 

[zar]

Dynabook, 1968.

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r36NNGzNvjo[/yt]

According to wikipedia:

Part of the motivation and funding for the Dynabook project came from the need for portable military maintenance, repair, and operations documentation. The paper-form of the field repair documentation for a single tank was larger than the tank itself. Eliminating the need to move mountains of difficult-to-access paper in a dynamic military theater provided significant U.S. Department of Defense funding.

One of the first actual tablet computers appeared in 1989, the GRiDPAD. http://www.pcworld.com/article/1882...history_of_unsuccessful_tablet_computers.html


I'm sure the concept of "soft copies" is much older. I mean, there have been audio-books ever since cassettes, hasn't there?

I'm not sure about 1987, but we had those Britannica CD-ROMs in the early 90s.

 

[milo bloom]

when i wrote my OU stories set in 20+ years from now, i was very careful to avoid mention of memory media, i think i just called a 'data stick' or a 'data card' or some such vagueness to avoid that kind of thing.

Also, the TNG tech manual states they made up fancy sounding words like "kiloquads" to describe memory storage without leaving themselves vulnerable to this phenomenon. Unless, of course, some wiseguy computer programmer decides to steal the term "kiloquad" for a measure of computer memory in the future...



Looking at that video, I was also reminded of Penny's computer book from the original Inspector Gadget cartoon. That sucker could do anything, including the video chat with the dog!

 

[j3067]

Like a lot of technical concepts, the idea for eBooks have been around for quite a while. I think the recent proliferation of electronic paper technology which has allowed for glare free screens are what really opened the throttle on eBooks. iPads and the like don't use glare free, but it was the Kindle that really got things going.

I travel a lot for work and I love that I can carry so many books without the bulk or weight of paper books.

 

[DimesDan]

when i wrote my OU stories set in 20+ years from now, i was very careful to avoid mention of memory media, i think i just called a 'data stick' or a 'data card' or some such vagueness to avoid that kind of thing.

I once made the argument that with smart phones, text speak and just sheer bloody laziness, capital letters would become irrelevant and a writing convention that has lasted hundreds of years would just end because of the advent of this new wonderous technology. Of course this could also be put down to the way children have been educated in the past few decades, either argument is valid.