This new surge for the hand-held book reader is based on elctronic ink display. This course of development continues the tangential focus on resolution and paper mimicry. The underlying print attributes of legibility (immediacy of display and navigation), haptic efficiency and persistence are still discounted. There is also the fully hidden aspect of virtualizing for the sake of virtualizing, that should be considered.

Perhaps a better approach would be adaptation of the hand-held reader to a kind of GPS capability for on-line text. In this function the reader would be oriented, not to books, but to graphic and text interpretation of physcial locations or events. Cultural tourism. The needed realization is that the ebook reader is a traditional blank book awaiting field notes and travel journal uses.

It turns out that I was doing my part to combat the decline in cursive.

Right on--I loved reading this letter. Nice image map.
Just a comment on Gary's comment... this is a beauty of an idea, because the GPS of virtual space already exists through linkages, etc. I believe there was a post on this in if:book a few months back. Is this a reflexive phenomenon? Has reading online trained us to examine our positioning in the network via hypertext, and subsequently, the text's/reader's position in real space? Does this desire have much to do with the proliferation of locative technology?

Sally,

Here is another GPS enhancement piloting people. The blank book exemplar seems useful. Most handheld screens are black when not in use. Such signature characteristics usually do match historical types. The commonplace book leaps to mind.

I can't describe how nice it was to decipher your hand and still have hyperlinks....it sort of felt like a breeze.

Dear Dan:

You obviously know nothing of my work; how you got to be a professor of anything is beyond me.

Yours,

MM