Steve Jobs observations on the Amazon Kindle book reader, and reading in general has caused some interesting debate on the whole matter.

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.” - NYT

I think the statement is not completely incorrect but I tend to agree with Charles Arthur from The Guardian.

“It would be foolish to predict how electronic reading is going to pan out, because there are two unstoppable trends going on which have been continuing for at least 20 years and show no signs of letting up: people prefer to read bite-sized pieces of information, and people are reading more distinct pieces. Whether we’re reading more in terms of the volume of words compared to 20 years ago is hard to tell, but I’d guess so.” - The Guardian

This trend is not limited to reading alone but part of a Snack Culture which embodies the phenomenon of products, services and experience becoming more temporary and transient; products that are being deconstructed in easier to digest, easier to afford bits, making it possible to collect even more experiences as often as possible, in an even shorter time frame. The signs are everywhere, from ubiquitous commerce to fragmented media to fast fashion to temporary ownership to Netflix-style all-you-can-eat models.

It is a fact that people read less books in the traditional way but the same goes for other types of content. Let’s have a look at the music industry. The sales of the traditional music CD are going down year after year, but I wouldn’t conclude that people don’t listen to music anymore. I just believe that the consumptions patterns are changing and digital content fits better with these consumptions patterns.

A good example is the iTunes WiFi Music store. Say you’re in line at Starbucks. You hear this amazing song wafting from the speakers. You gotta have it. Now. Tap the iTunes button on your iPhone or iPod touch, tap the Starbucks button, and preview, buy, and download whatever you like, right then and there. Basically the idea behind the Kindle is the same - with a tap of a button you connect to amazon.com and can access, preview and buy ten thousands of books.

So I believe Mr. Job has it wrong, when he says that people don’t read anymore, they just read different things like RSS feeds, websites, forums, blogs and of course e-books in different ways using e-readers like the Kindle or the iLiad or other devices like a laptop or a mobile phone, dare i say iPhone?

Now and than I will try to spend some time to share some of the tips and tricks on how they get the most out of their iLiad, from the people within iRex.

If you like to store a large amount of content on your iLiad, like some of the people here, the best way to do this is to extend the storage capacity of the iLiad with an external MMC or CF card. However it is not possible to easily access your documents on the external memory card via the archives keys. To solve this one of our engineers came up with a nice trick

When you press on one of the archive key (e.g. Books) on the iLiad, you would not only see the content on the internal memory but also an entry to content on other external memories (e.g. Books on CF card). This way you can use the archive keys to easily access your content regardless on which memory they are stored.

To enable this, download the necessary files here and follow the instructions in the readme.txt file.

If you experience any trouble make sure to let us known here.

It has been a bit quiet on the i-to-i blog recently but this will certainly change considering all the interesting developments and activities that you can expect to see from us in 2008.

For those who might have missed it, on the Teleread blog you can find a short Q&A, where I address some of the questions from David Rothman in regard to the iLiad and future developments. Make sure to check it out here.

A few weeks ago we had a visit from the Dutch television for the program ‘In de ban van het ding‘. This weekend the third episode covered the iLiad as well as the Kindle.