I'm going to paraphrase a speech that science fiction writer Isaac Asimov once made in response to claims that books-on-tape would one day replace books. Asimov said it better, but my memory isn't perfect, so here goes:

With technology, stuff evolves. So, it's natural that a medium for transmitting stories or information would also evolve. We have seen, recently, some new media that can be used to communicate stories, such as e-texts.

Using my (Isaac Asimov's) science fiction imagination, I will therefore project this technology into the future to see how media for stories can evolve.

For one thing, it takes energy to read e-texts. You need the energy to run the computer and the monitor that you are using to read stories off of the internet. In the future, as resources become more scarce, we will find a medium for communicating stories that does not require as much energy. Eventually, of course, the energy needed to read stories could be reduced to a negligable amount, which could be provided easily by the person who is reading the story.

For another, it could be made more convenient to browse through e-texts. E-texts, as one long document on a computer, are difficult to manage in that it is hard to save your place. If you want to scroll to the end, you sometimes have to hold down on the down button for an awfully long time. In the future, moving backward and forward through the texts will be made easier. Eventually, of course, this can be made almost effortlessly, so that a single hand motion could move the reader to any portion of the document, and the reader could control what part of the document he was looking at only with his mind.

Another consideration is size. Even laptop computers are fairly bulky, taking up almost an entire suitcase. In the future, devices for reading texts could be made much smaller, perhaps small enough to fit into a pocket. However, they would still be large enough to be held comfortably. An ideal size would be found which I imagine would be slim, and perhaps a dozen centimeters in height and length for easy viewing and holding.

Still another is wiring. Computers use a large amount of wire to function. There are power cables, moniter cables, keyboard cables, internet cables, and so on. Obviously, as I mentioned before, power requirements will become less in the future so power cords may be eliminated. Yet, also, eventually all of the other cords could be eliminated. The text reader would take zero time to set up or load, and could not be wired incorrectly or make a mess of wire under the desk.

A further issue might be durability. Computers cannot get wet; you can't shake them too much or read them upside down; you can't take them somewhere too hot or too cold; and I think in my (not Isaac Asimov's) computer manual it says something about exposure to direct sunlight. A text reader of the future would not have these limitations. Although it would be too expensive to make something perfectly resiliant, devices of the future would of course be able to take direct sunlight, be resiliant to heat or cold, and be able to be shaken, manhandled, squished, hit with hammers, or sat on by accident and you still wouldn't lose your place in the story.

So, to sum up, a future text reader would have to be superior to one that we use today. It would consume almost no energy, be easy to browse through so that you can peek at the end without holding down on the down key and without losing your place, it would be small enough to fit in your pocket but large enough to hold comfortably, it would have no wires and would not need to be set up, and it would be durable to withstand heat, cold, or even pounding with a hammer. Such a device sounds fantastic, and you may think it will not be invented for centuries.

However, such a device already exists. It was discovered by the ancients thousands of years ago. It is -- and some of you are probably already ahead of me -- called the "book".

-Ka"It's so inconvenient to read e-texts in bed!"z!