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- Robert Silverberg
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| Lecton | ||
| A device that would read aloud an electronic text book. |
Waking up in the future is never easy - after a few centuries, technology advances.
| The bookstore resembled, instead, an electronic laboratory. The books were crystals with recorded contents. They can be read the aid of an opton, which was similar to a book but had only one page between the covers. At a touch, successive pages of the text appeared on it. But optons were little used, the sales-robot told me. The public preferred lectons - like lectons read out loud, they could be set to any voice, tempo, and modulation. Only scientific publications having a very limited distribution were still printed, on a plastic imitation paper. |
| Technovelgy from Return from the Stars,
by Stanislaw Lem. Published by Not known in 1961 Additional resources -
|
Compare this item to the reading machine from Robert Heinlein's 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land.
Notice also that this is not simply a "book on tape." This is a performance that the user can alter - setting voice, tempo and modulation. See this article on Vocaloid Voice - Soul Singing Synthesis for a modern example of this technology.
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More Ideas
and Technology from Return from the Stars
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and Technology by Stanislaw Lem
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Tech news articles related to works by Stanislaw Lem
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'Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They're interested in only one thing: the survival of the city.'
'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
