The Speculist

I have serious doubts that this will happen with the cellphone as we know it. The problem is usability restrictions due to limited I/O capabilities. Ie, the user is limited currently to what appears on a small LCD screen. If you have a cellphone with browsing capability, then you technically already have an electronic book. After all, you can surf to any of a host of free books on the web and kinda read it through the painfully small and difficult interface.

Instead, I think there's great potential in something like Steve Mann's eyetap. A little more shrinking and all you might need is a small earphone/mike and an "eyetap"/camera. The electronics and functionality could either hide in these pieces or in some accessible network service.

Karl

The "eyetap" concept is good, but it'll never catch on until it works within normal eyeglass frames, or contact lenses, or something more... permanent. :-)

I agree that the small screen is a big problem for electronic books read on a cellphone. But what if a sheet of electronic paper were rolled up within the cellphone? Check out the picture at this post:

http://www.blog.speculist.com/archives/000254.html

Click on the picture for a larger view.

You could have a nice sized screen that way - It would make for better portable TV viewing too.

And how about having the phone read to you? It's not the same as a professionally produced book-on-tape, but text-to-speech software is improving all the time.

Stephen, the eyetap pictured was smaller than eyeglass frames and I saw a picture somewhere on Steve Mann's site showing a version that is hidden in a pair of sunglasses (though the computer unit needs to be worn on a belt).

I haven't thought about the electronic paper thing. My take is that it'll be a while before the stuff is durable enough to do what you want. It might need some sort of self-repair capability.

Karl:

...or just be cheap enough to replace often.