Tech it, or leave it

By Paul Flower on Dec 3, 08 08:05 PM

There's an old story, possibly apocryphal, about how the Americans spent a decade and thousands of dollars inventing a pen which would work in zero gravity situations and could therefore be used on their space missions. The Russians, meanwhile, used a pencil.

Even if it isn't true it is an indication of how we constantly strive to find a technological solution to a problem that really doesn't exist. Of course there are now countless innovations which once would have been beyond our wildest imaginings. Who would've thought, even 20 years ago, that we'd have the capability of carrying our record collections in our pockets? There was a time when I could barely climb over all of my vinyl to leave my bedroom, and I'm not joking.

Just because it can be done, doesn't mean it should be. Ipods play videos now of course, and I noticed someone watching a film on one very recently. I was on a London tube train at the time peeking over his shoulder amazed that he was viewing one of 'The Lord of the Rings' films. I can think of few epics less suited to a small screen - particularly when you consider that it wasn't even an ipod touch, it was one of the older/classic versions with the small screen - and he was watching the film in widescreen so it didn't even fill that.

I was also forced to wonder about the duration of his commute. It takes almost as long to watch one of those films as it did to make them. I accept that some people have a need to escape reality - particularly on a crowded train - but this seemed a little beyond. Yes, this technology allows you to do that, it doesn't mean that you have to.

This realisation has been forced upon me by my interest in the 'Sony Reader'. I'm a man, so naturally I have a magpie-like fixation with anything new, shiny and technical looking. I also read a lot of books (if 3 per month is a lot?) so the 'reader' looked like the ideal invention for me.

In case you haven't seen it, it is essentially an ipod for books. You can download books to it and store around 160 on it. The reader is thin and light, the clarity is beautiful, etc. So you'd think it was made for someone like me - a gadget lover who reads & commutes. It probably is, however I won't be quick to shell out the £199 they're asking for one. This is partly due to the almost TWO HUNDRED POUNDS retail price (possibly now reduced by £5 thanks to Brown & Darling) and also as an ebook costs around the same price as a physical book.

Read that last sentence again and then remind yourself how the music industry went to ruin partly because they had no instinct about pricing-points for e-music/downloads, consequently forcing those who wanted them to try and find them for free. This is a glib summary of the past five years in music industry theory, but I think you see what I mean. A book download costs as much as a real printed book plus a couple of hundred for the device to read them on.

I have no doubt that there's probably an application for the iphone that allows you to read ebooks on it thus trashing Sony's baby, but I'm honestly forced to wonder how many meetings and how much development went into an invention which is essentially a white elephant thanks to pricing idiocy.

The other flaw is very obvious. Who really needs to carry 160 books with them? I accept that some people read more than one book at a time and students need text-books. On the other hand there is now the World Wide Web for info and books are not really like music. It's not as if you might be reading the new Grisham and half-way through think that you might fancy some Shakespeare. Or perhaps you'll be skipping through a Stephen King horror and suddenly decide you would like a chapter of Chomsky. It doesn't work like that.

They can make it, so they made it. Doesn't mean we have to buy it. It's not on my Christmas list anyway.