I've got to love my Beloved. She is probably one of the few women in this world who would see a trip to Five Guys and Barnes & Nobles as a good date. I guess it does take someone special to love and marry geeks.
Alas, one does what one can.
Anyways, the biggest thing for geeks that travelled across my awareness this past week were the movie trailers. First up was the new The Last Airbender trailer which is totally and utterly awesome. Then there is a new red-band Kick-Ass International trailer that is hard to find working links for. Those two are kind of my two "must-see" movies for this year.
Of other news is the fact that Barnes & Nobles has placed Nook units for display purposes in every brick-and-mortar store. The UI is interesting, and I would still like a uni-tasker in this case. Having my phone hold books works for a lot of things but reading does eat up a decent amount of battery life, and then having a dedicated device for books would just be nice.
The sad thing is that most of the devices out at the moment cripple the books in their associated stores with device-locking DRM.
Well, it's not really the devices as those selling the files to place on the devices. For example, the Nook and the Cool-ER readers both support the ePUB format (which does not require DRM) but the stores associated with both devices sell files that are crippled with the stuff. Which means if I purchase a book from them, then I would not be able to read it on my phone.
Currently, the only option that I know of to purchase eBooks (fiction ones that is, the o'Reily series of technical books for computers are DRM free) that I can use effectively anywhere are from Baen's WebScription.Net. Every other eBook provider makes it easier to pirate a book than to get one to read upon my phone and whatever future device I may desire.
And since Speculative Fiction is about looking forward, the future I see from this kind of scares me…
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