Insanely credulous article makes one question the credibility of VentureBeat.
Most useful link is in the comments:
To give Acrobat.com Presentations a spin, visit http://labs.acrobat.com/
Acrobat.com, Adobe’s website of free office software, is unveiling a new tool today that marks the early steps towards competing with PowerPoint, the ubiquitous presentation-making software in Microsoft Office. As a part of Acrobat.com Labs, Presentations is still in early testing mode, with many features still to come. But judging from the demonstration that Adobe’s Erik Larson gave me last week (including a presentation made in Acrobat.com Presentations, naturally), there’s a solid core for Adobe to build around.
I haven’t actually used Presentations yet
via Acrobat.com challenges PowerPoint with collaborative presentations » VentureBeat.
The immiment demise of Ann Arbor’s quirky, well-regarded Shaman Drum bookstore has sparked a very interesting thread over at the Ann Arbor Chronicle, which inspired me to write this about the future of e-books and publishing. The whole thread is worth reading.
(in response to post 28) Scott — I am well aware of Tablet PCs — I attended Microsoft’s alpha stage Tablet SDK meeting and had a first-generation Motion Tablet– but IMHO there is still a long way to go for Tablets to approach the readability and portability of paper. That is to say nothing of paper’s instant-on feature, complete absence of [electronic] bugs, and [sometimes literally] bulletproof security compared to Windows Vista Tablet PC Edition …
What I don’t like about the current generation of e-readers is that the e-book manufacturers are forcing major design and readability compromises on publishers–a classic example of technology-driven product development. What publishers want and need is to be able to display e-books using the universal publishing standard for high-quality design display: PDF. You simply can’t present a design-driven title likeTHE DEFINITIVE ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF TORPEDO BOATS (for Anonymouse’s sake!) in device-independent dumbed-down HTML.
As you may know, the current generation of book readers uses the E-Ink technology, which currently does B&W 800 x 640 on a flexible substrate. They project that color E-Ink devices will become available no earlier than 2011. Hi-res is important: readability studies shows that paper with 600 dpi is the gold standard. a 600 dpi 8 x 10 page is 4800 x 6000 pixels, which is still a pretty big image even for today’s computers.
I suspect that E-Ink devices capable of displaying hi-res PDF will be ~ 2015.
What does this mean for publishers and booksellers? For publishers, it means a (losing) struggle with e-book manufacturers over their share of the revenue pie. For booksellers, it means less revenue from simply delivering physically encoded books to people, and figuring out a way to move up the value chain–which I think is what Karl Pohrt is planning to do. I like the idea of a bookstore as a salon, but if I look around at other industries it seems that continuous physical presence is a more difficult business model to operate than old reliables like personal appearances, training classes, and consulting services.
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