I am a gadget slut…

It should surprise no one that I am a gadget slut. I love technology and the cool things it can do for us. I guess I see most things as puzzles, and learning how to make them work is a challenge. I embrace that challenge and don’t have nightmares about VCRs blinking “12:00” forever.

I love my iPod Touch, especially with all of the apps that allow me to do different things. I’ve downloaded books from the Internet and had them in my Touch before the person telling me about a particular book has gotten to the point in the conversation where he says, “You really have to read this book.” When he does, I smile and say, “Already got it, right here, right now.” Or having a free app that lets me look up what movies are showing and watch a trailer right then and there. Or having an app that provides coupons, or tracks my flights or the Dictionary.com app which I find myself using more than my twenty year old dictionary.

In doing my annual search through catalogs, I did come across one great geek gift: The Ultimate Geek Pen. (Nope, I am not getting consideration from the retailer for this mention.) The Pen has a stylus for use with PDAs, a ballpoint pen, a laser pointer, an LED light and an ultraviolet light. The LED light even has a flexible gooseneck to it that lets you position it as you wish. It’s only $10 and it’s on my list. (It’s also out of stock at the company and is on backorder, alas and alack.)

This pen does a boatload of things. I remember the first multi-function pen I saw which was unique in that it wrote in three different colors. Now, in a pen that is the same size as that one was, I get lights, I get a laser and I get a pen. And I get a stylus that works with devices that didn’t exist when that first pen did (but might well work on clay and wax tablets… hmmm, there’s an idea for a story).

As rumors gather about the Mac Tablet and the Microsoft Courier and the JooJoo tablet, and as PDAs and smartphones come to do yet more things, we get to see multiple capabilities all wrapped into a single device. What we will see, as I have with the various apps I’m using, is that these devices go from being novelties to very important parts of our lives. As we come to rely on them more and more, we won’t want to be without them and we come to trust them to be able to handle more things well and effortlessly.

So it will be, over the next two years especially, that we come to trust these devices more and more with delivering reading material. Folks will go from saying, “I could never curl up with an electronic device to read,” to “I still like curling up with my favorite book, but for other reading, my PDA/phone/tablet works just fine.” They will shift from refusing to accept the future, to justifying an attachment to the past. As the devices prove their worth in one area, they will be given opportunities in others.

For this reason, and this reason alone, I am betting the future of e-books is a lot brighter than most other prognosticators, and will pick up speed a lot more quickly than anyone will imagine. In two years time, this prediction will seem quite quaint.

And yet I will smile, because the person who is telling me it is quaint, will have read it on a handheld device they never imagined they’d own or like at the same time I’m writing these very words.