ENDNOTE - In Reflections on the eBook in the April edition of Syllabus magazine,
Howard Strauss, Manager of Technology Strategy and Outreach at Princeton University,
says that "books are wonderful things, but eBooks are an awful idea." Why? Because
they're based on the comforting paradigm of paper and the book and that just doesn't
work when you transfer the book information to technology. Instead, Strauss says, we
need to develop intelligent digital information storage and retrieval systems that can be
used to build personal information devices. Strauss believes that information should be
stored in a standard format that allows it to be accessed from many different devices,
depending on the type of information to be retrieved. Novels, for example, he suggests,
would work well retrieved by a tiny pocket-sized device he calls "myOwn." myOwn
would be a text-to-speech device that could retrieve any of his electronically stored
novels and would read the novel to him as he did other tasks (driving, walking,
gardening.) Voice patterns would let him select his narrator. If he wanted to read the
novel he would connect it to his TV, laptop, or PDA.

Textbooks, journals, and dictionaries are another matter, says Strauss, and would need
a different device. To create devices for these types of information, authors and
publishers will need to think differently. They'll need to stop writing for paper and stop
building digital analogs of paper. The key characteristics of books are "information,"
not "paper." Authors and publishers will need to think "outside of the book." (Syllabus,
Apr 03, vol 16 no 9, Reflections: Another Look at Education Technology, pp 42 and 41)