Early E-Paper Exposure, OR: Adoption Atrocities

We notice things that don't work. We don't notice things that do. We notice computers, we don't notice pennies. We notice e-book readers, we don't notice books. -- Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

I can't find my copy of Salmon of Doubt, so I paid a penny shy of two dollars for the electronic version on Apple Books. I didn't bother looking up the Kindle version because buying books through Kindle on an iPad is a pain. Besides, I've read Salmon of Doubt cover to cover and at this point I'm only referencing it more than reading it. This highlights an advantage of ebooks over their paper predecessors: the ability to search the text with keywords. 

Sadly, another resource of Douglas Adams' wisdom and insight appears to have become lost media. His BBC Radio 4 series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Future, which has an episode devoted to eBooks, cannot be listened to because it uses RealPlayer and nothing uses that anymore. At least, nothing I have uses RealPlayer anymore; according to their site, they've gone Windows only. 

Overall, he had a fairly complicated opinion about ePublishing. Many possibilities, but all depend on the execution. Adams left us in May of 2001, long before Amazon became the powerhouse we know it as today. At that time, eReaders were very niche devices only made by a handful of companies, the biggest of which was Sony. Strangely, though, none of the other electronics giants seemed at all interested in competing with Sony on this front. For all intents and purposes, it was them and Rocketbook. 

Sometime between 1997 and 2002, when I was working at a local Target's electronics counter, someone asked if we had any eReaders. His had packed up and, the way he made it sound, left his library completely inaccessible. I felt really bad for him. There was nothing we could do; I don't even think we had our PDA's stocked at that point, and no one was using any of those to read eBooks. I think about that guy every now and again, especially when Amazon releases a new Kindle or I see a review of some other eReader on YouTube. He was an early adopter, and unfortunately paid the worst possible price for it. Looking back, I would have assumed he could at least read the files on his desktop or laptop. Otherwise, how would he have gotten the books onto the reader? Nonetheless, it had to be frustrating. I hope the frustration is long behind him and he's happy with whatever eReader he's gotten for himself now.