As Amazon begins to ship its new Kindle 2 electronic book reader, here’s an Internet article that’s worth reading: “Kindle 2 Reads Aloud, as Sci-Fi Predicted,” by Bill Christensen, posted at LiveScience.com. Focusing on the text-to-speech feature in Kindle 2, Christensen asks “How long ago did science fiction writers predict that people would prefer to have a machine read to them, rather than read the news themselves?” The answers, as provided by Christensen:
• In 1961, Polish writer Stanislaw Lem wrote about a “lecton” in his novel Return from the Stars
• In 1959, Philip K. Dick wrote about an office memo that reads itself in his short story "War Game"
• In 1934, David H. Keller wrote about a “sound-transposing machine”
in his novella "The Lost Language"
• In 1899, H.G. Wells wrote about a “babble machine” in his story
"When the Sleeper Wakes"
Read the full article for details.
Monday, February 23, 2009
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2 comments:
The Kindle is actually quite classy; it's like a convergance of old school and new school technology
I concur!
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