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"...being predictive, being right about the future, is not the point of any given story or novel. The point is about exploring as wide a range of possibilities as possible."
- Peter Watts
 |
| Telebook | ||
| A book made available in text on a television screen. |
| They turned the pages, which were yellow and crinkly... and then, when they turned back to the page before, it had the same words on it...
"Gee," said Tommy. "What a waste. When you're through with the book, you just throw it away, I guess. Our television screen must have had a million books on it and its good for plenty more. I wouldn't throw it away. "Same with mine," said Margie. She was eleven and hadn't seen as many telebooks as Tommy had. |
| From The Fun They Had,
by Isaac Asimov. Published by Children's Magazine in 1951 Additional resources -
|
This is not quite the same as an electronic book; but it does pretty effectively predict the existence of services like the Gutenberg project, which has many thousands of books onscreen in text form.
Take a look at the description of tanks from Murray Leinster's 1946 short story A Logic Named Joe. It specifically mentions the idea of a central repository that can find requested information and then display it on a screen (a "logic or vision-receiver) at your own home.
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Telebook-related
news articles:
- Read Google EBooks On Google TV
| Millimeter-Scale Computing For 'Internet of Things' |
| Fujitsu Touchscreen Mixes Real And Virtual Worlds |
| Nanowire Memristor Networks Form 'Brains' |
| US Census Will Be Online In 2020 |
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