What you’re doing now, if you care to think of it that way, is reading a book.
The Lightbook
What’s so special?
It happens to be on the Internet, in the actual form of a web site, but you have been turning the pages just as though it were a paper-based book or a magazine. If it were held on the hard disk of a laptop computer, say, instead of being downloaded from out there in space, you’d have an electronic book.
There will, very shortly, be hundreds of thousands of e-books. And e-magazines, and e-brochures, e-manuals, in fact e-everything-that’s-now-printed-on-paper. Which, apart from being environmentally sound, means that carrying a large library of things to read will be as easy as carrying your mobile.
It will also, and far more importantly, give the world’s poor of the world access to education. The “One Laptop Per Child” initiative ─ OLPC ─ is already launching this, the most important philanthropic enterprise in a hundred years and more. Their laptop computer, the XO, is now being given away free to children in the Third World : a truly excellent idea.
It has only one snag, though, and it’s a huge one. A laptop computer needs electricity to recharge its batteries. Reading pages on a laptop PC consumes electrical energy. Lots of it.
The amount of energy needed to read a page of a book on a screen depends, crucially, on the kilobytes of memory taken up by that page ─ kilobytes which are taken from somewhere and put onto a screen.
The average size of each of the100-plus pages which make up this web site is 62 Kb.
Each of its pages could ─ absolutely identically ─ be a page in an e-book created in Illumination and presented on the Lightbook.
In which case, it would on average take up only 4 Kb of memory.