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October 12, 2009
Microsoft Wants to Bring More Books to the Big Screen
Good Morning Silicon Valley's John Murrell reports in Ballmer: Books should be read the way they were meant to be — on a PC that Microsoft has no interest in joining the eReader market because “We have a device for reading. It’s the most popular device in the world. It’s the PC,” according to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Quoting from Reuters.
Balmer did say that Microsoft would be happy to work with Kindle-maker Amazon or others on bringing more books to the PC. But how? Hopefully not by way of some typically clunky homegrown Microsoft code that locks users out of being able to manipulate text. [JH]
October 12, 2009 in Electronic Resource, Information Technology, Publishing Industry | Permalink
Comments
Not to be disparaging, but I'm doing research right now in an institution and country that is not rich in English language books and have no choice but to use e books on a computer screen. They are cumbersome, tedious, have strange malfunctions (this week I got the main library to correct the big AUC name and logo sprawled across the entire page of an Oxford e book, making the table of contents impossible to read). I'd say that not so many people will read whole books this way. Maybe no one cares if whole books are read anymore. Maybe it's in keeping with the times to read small sections and cut and paste quotes. Aside from that, researching this way will make you go blind. My eyes are shot but not so shot that I won't get around to writing on libraries and e waste and the real cost of library digitization to the environment as soon as finish my current research on climate change in the MENA.
Posted by: Christine Anderson, Cairo, Egypt | Oct 12, 2009 8:27:56 AM
