dale lane

I was reading a book in bed tonight. My wife was curious about it, and asked questions about what I was reading. We talked about it for a bit, and it got her interest.

As with most of the books that I read at the moment, I read it as an e-book on my phone. So, I was able to go into ‘File Explorer’, select the book file, click on ‘Beam File…’, and choose my wife’s Treo from the list of nearby Bluetooth devices. After a brief pause, a prompt showed up on the Treo screen asking if she wanted to install it. She clicked ‘yes’ and a copy of the book opened on her phone.

I’m impressed – how cool is that? We have different OS’s (I use Windows Mobile 5, and my wife uses Palm OS), no cables, no need for having to get out of bed and connect our phones to a PC to swap files, no need to convert file formats, no setup… nothing. Just choose a file on one phone and send it, then receive it and open it on the other. This is how all our devices should work.

When I heard that the new Microsoft Zune portable media player would come with wifi to allow sharing with other Zune owners, I thought this was a great idea. I’m not sure how they’ve implemented it in practice (I bet it’s DRM’ed to the eyeballs!) but I think the concept is exactly right. The fun bit of all this new digital content is not just enjoying it on your own, but being able to share it with your friends and family.

To be a little negative, this evening wasn’t a complete model of barrier-less interactivity. I’m not sure if I broke eReader.com‘s rules by transferring a book to another device (I have looked on their website, and can’t find anything that forbids this, but I might have missed it).

And we were helped by the fact that my wife and I both use eReader. There are other e-book programs, which all have different formats. If I used Microsoft Reader, for example, then this wouldn’t have worked. (In fact, I’ve often seen books that I’ve wanted to get, that annoyingly were available in every electronic format except the eReader one!).

So, things would be better if content providers didn’t feel they had to lock down everything to prevent sharing, and if e-book providers could agree on a single open standard that all different e-book readers could use.

But, even with those gripes, I’m still impressed. This is how technology should be.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 3rd, 2006 at 11:38 pm and is filed under tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.