Flash, spin and the future

This weekend I accidentally and very vigorously washed and tumble-dried my 2GB USB stick. The stick is carries most of the digital photo archive for fifthestate, as well as a couple of manuscripts containing my edits, and some open source software, essential for the smooth running of this blog. Of course, it’s absolutely fine, and everything still works perfectly. A normal occurence now, but cast your mind back 3 years and consider the likely effects of a gallon of water and a dose of persil would have on a hard drive.

Whilst I waited for half of fifthestate’s work in progress to finish soapily clanking around behind the glass window of the washing machine, here’s what was spinning though my mind:

Wikipedia on flash memory (as opposed to a conventional hard drive with moving parts):

flash memory is non-volatile, which means that it does not need power to maintain … Another allure of flash memory is that when packaged in a ‘memory card’, it is nearly indestructible by ordinary physical means, being able to withstand intense pressure and boiling water.

One of the most convincing arguments I’ve held in my armoury for the superiority of the physical book is that you can do almost anything to it (drop it, write in it, tear pages out, bang nails into the wall with it) and it survives in a useable form. This is more than you can say for most pieces of prototype hardware designed for e-books, especially if my 1998 laptop is anything to go by.

Well, you’ll still have a long way to convince me that specialised (dedicated) hardware for ebooks is a winner. But times are changing, as anyone with an iPod nano (also uses flash memory, unlike the full size iPod which has a hard drive) will tell you. Electronic media hardware is getting about as robust as a baby elephant. FutureoftheBook have been efficiently tracking this, seemingly since before the days when email replaced letters.

Storage space and volatility no longer such an issue, and battery life improving, we can concentrate on more qualitative barriers to bringing books to a fresh audience, such as conflicting form-factor requirements (Large amounts of text require large screens to be read comfortably, right? While market pressure for portable devices is for them to be smaller…)

So with the stretch of flash improving on an almost daily basis, even the dawn of an age where it is no longer necessary to store/house anything locally, and the widescreen iPod just around the corner, the answer is probably sitting within 4 feet of us. Given the widespread adoption of the video-MP3 player it is slightly baffling why we publishers don’t experiment with the iPod (and Microsoft’s forthcoming rival player Zune) more thoroughly. Who knows, maybe Apple and Microsoft would be even quicker off the mark in developing on a competive platform for books if sample content was already there to meet them?

Here’s 4 suggestions/thoughts from the laundrette. By no means an expert opinion, but more a snapshot of the mind of an editor who’s a very recent but willing recruit to the 21st Century: