I’ve enjoyed the series, though the books are a little childish, but Paolini was only young when he started writing them (and is still only 26) and the books have matured with him, tackling more complex issues with each one.

Likewise, there were only going to be three originally. It has expanded to include a fourth, upcoming, book, and so has changed from a trilogy to a ‘cycle.’

Brisingr is a fairly hefty book, but it’s a nice read, nothing too heavy of slow. One thing you have to admire is the scale of story. While the overarching plot has been known for a while, you didn’t get much scope of this vast conflict that has consumed the whole land, but Brisingr opens it up.

That’s not to say this is classic fiction, but while it might not stand next to the great fantasy epics, it has eclipsed most with it’s reach and that’s because the characters are engaging enough and it offers some home comforts (familiar races, etc) mixed with enough new things (for most of us) to keep it interesting.

• Price
• Availability
• Interoperability

So let’s take a quick look at each.

Price

Yes, as stated in the NY Times article, there probably isn’t as much saving over print versions as we all imagine. So consumers need to be realistic. On the other hand, when I can buy a paper copy cheaper than the electronic one, you know things are off. I don’t care if you put the price of the printed versions up (well, I do) but e-books must be cheaper than a paper equivalent. So when the hardcover is out, it should be cheaper than that, and when the paperback is released, it needs to drop in price to be cheaper than it. Simple.

So how come, over at Waterstones the hardcover version of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol is £9.79 and the eBook (as they state it) is £13.58? And that’s in a 30% off eBooks offer as well. I’m sure there are some arguments about competition, maybe the publishers don’t want people to buy the electronic copy. For electronic sales to kick-off though, that should be at least the same price (you could argue it’s immediately available so this offsets the relative extra cost). It’s not limited to hardcover/new release books either. Angels and Demons is available for £4.79 in paperback (two different versions) but is £6.54 for the eBook.

Now take into consideration that you can’t loan the electronic copy (sometimes you can, but only if allowed and only if your friends have a compatible reader) and you can’t sell it on when you’re done as you can with a physical copy and electronic copies fall behind again.

So, the price needs to be below the cheapest available paper copy.

Availability

Amazon doesn’t even list e-books for sale, though the likes of Waterstones, WHSmiths and CoolerBooks do. What you’ll find is a relatively tiny range limited to brand new blockbusters and cut-price classics. Typically the female-dominated crime sector doesn’t do too bad, but anything else is missing so much you’ll easily find gaps. None of the Harry Potter books are available in electronic format by way of an example.

You can’t even guarantee all of an author’s back catalogue is available. Taking Dan Brown as an example again, three of his five novels are available (The Lost Symbol, Angels & Demons and Deception Point) but not the best selling book of all-time: The Da Vinci Code.

To make matters more interesting, some stores have different versions (not different formats) of the same book. CoolerBooks has three versions of Angels & Demons listed, two at £4.86 and one at £5.56, I’ve got no idea what the difference is.

Interoperability

Which brings is on to interoperability. Amazon’s Kindle uses its own format, CoolerBooks has a whole page dedicated to the formats available. WHSmiths talks about four different formats but Waterstones seems to stick with one. Which one is compatible with which reader? No idea.

MP3 is currently the standard for online shops selling music downloads. Not because it’s the best format, far from it, but it works on the widest range of hardware. As has been shown before, proprietary formats don’t work and eventually consumers will force a winner. PDF and EPUB seem to be winning the format war, so I expect the Kindle to start supporting it soon and, whether it’s the best or not, so we’ll eventually end up with a standard.

Whether that works on all the hardware is another matter (because of DRM). As seen in the music industry, the DRM will be subverted soon enough and so they might as well drop it now. That would drop this barrier so at least I can take my eBooks with me and read them on whatever hardware I choose to buy.

Is that it? Is that all that is holding back adoption of e-books? No, the hardware is not there yet either, but it’s coming. Wholesale adoption, especially by those who read the most, is probably help up by availability the most. More books need to be available before it becomes viable to switch.

Incidentally, when do we get to drop the hyphen? E-book, eBook, ebook? We’ll get there eventually.

So from that perspective it excites me, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  If the gesture and voice recognition is as good as they allege it is we could be looking at a game changer for human-computer interaction.  We really would have a Minority Report-style interface.  For normal interaction it’s probably less important (voice commands and gestures have limited use at your desk, and keyboards are as fast if not faster than writing, dictating would be good, but too noisy and public), but imagine it for interacting with almost anything else.  Voice commands or gestures would work great for watching TV (‘increase volume’, ‘decrease volume’, ‘change to BBC 1’), no more hunting for the remote.  What about browsing through online stores, reading books, playing music, mixing music would be great with gestures.  Google’s Nexus One phone has shown voice recognition has come on recently, imagine dictating notes, text messages or emails to your computer (I still think there’s an issue with privacy and noise to overcome though).

Gestures would work well for some things on your computer too, how about adjusting the volume by using a volume dial gesture and just rotate up and down to increase and decrease?  Combine that with some augmented reality and you have a universal interface for controlling anything.  Look at the thermostat control and options would be displayed, then just tap the virtual options without getting up.  Then you could even design your own interface instead of having to put up with whatever the designer thought was important.

That’s just the direct interaction element too.  The demos have the system recognising objects and colours, perhaps more, so the implications for passive interaction are big too.  It could identify the book you’re reading and download related material or suggest other authors, maybe read facial expressions and select music to match your mood, or identify when it’s getting dark and offer to switch on the lights.

Maybe MS are doing a better PR job than the others, but I don’t seem to have seen this from anyone else.  If the technology is as good as they lead us to believe this could have an impact a long way from just games consoles.  Microsoft could make an exponential leap forward in game and general technology interface design if Natal does debut before the end of the year as planned.

That’s not to say that the book isn’t enjoyable, it’s still a good read filled with some interesting ideas. It still seems to meander around and then finish a bit too abruptly though. I also think that the series lacks a good strong villain.

Let’s say we all embrace cloud computing, it means we have to be connected all the time to have access to our documents and media. Not so bad at home, broadband is becoming commonplace and so too are 3G mobile contracts. What about in your car though, or on your boat, or your bike?

The video shows plugging a SIM card into a car so it can receive news and GPS updates. What about being able to play back song from streaming services, or getting internet radio, perhaps TV, anywhere you can get a mobile signal?

Some vehicles are already coming with SIM cards in, you’ll be able to text your car, and it’ll be able to send and receive GPS data (so you can track it), but it also means you have access to anything on the web.

There has been talk of things like WIMAX (long range, really fast WIFI), the 3G network seems to be groaning already it seems, but using either multiple SIMs attached to a single account (you’re not going to want to take it out of one device and put into another) or being able to hook your phone up to your car and use it as a wireless dongle (known as tethering) is something I can see happening more starting this year and taking off next year and onwards.

I think electronic readers and tablets are going to have a huge impact on the textbook business. Some textbooks cost more than $100. What student can pay for that? So I think for school books and research materials tablets will be absolutely wonderful. I’m ridiculously optimistic.

It’s a nice idea but will it mean cheaper textbooks are will they be more expensive in the long run?  Aside from the issues that publishers haven’t grasped we expect to pay less for electronic copies, the real cost of a $100 textbook isn’t the printed material.  There’s some in there, and some overhead for the fact that they need to make the investment in the typesetting etc on what will probably be a small print run.  Most of that cost, I suspect, is because this is a specialist subject and you won’t find the info anywhere else, and it took a lot of effort to accumulate it.

So making it electronic won’t make it much cheaper as the price premium will still be there but, if the current trend continues, you’ll no longer be able to buy a used copy for cheaper or sell it on once you’re done to re-coup some of the cost.  So most students may actually end up worse off with electronic textbooks.

[Ace] ran for the first time on 10 May 1950. By modern standards it was sluggish but in its day was the fastest in the world.

And, whilst investigating how it could be used, the team uncovered another problem that looked set to dog greater use of computers – how accurate were they?

“When you put decimal numbers in a computer they have to be converted to binary,” said Professor Maurice Cox, who also worked on Ace and its descendants. “The conversion is not exact.”

“Errors in the data can build up,” said Professor Cox. “Those errors can explode if you have an unstable method of calculation.”

Jim Wilkinson took on and defeated that uncertainty. Remembered with affection by everyone that worked with him, his work has been overshadowed by Turing.

“He was brilliant in his own right,” said Clive Hall, a former colleague of Mr Wilkinson and who oversees some of the computer archives at NPL. “The problem was that he came to NPL when Alan Turing was there.”

By splitting data into packets and threading them on the same line, the carrying capacity of that link could be boosted and the whole network made more powerful.

Roger Scantlebury, who worked with Dr Davies, presented the ideas about “packet switching” to a conference in the US, where they were picked up by the creators of the nascent Arpanet, the fledgling internet.

Does that mean Britain invented the internet?

“Yes and no,” said Mr Scantlebury. “Certainly the underlying technology of the internet, which is packet switching, we did invent.”

Chalk another couple of milestones up to the Brits.