SUNDRIES: An eighteenth century newsletter

TECH TALK: The Librie

I suppose everyone has a different idea of the Holy Grail of portable e-text readers. Being able to read such a device in any light that works for a print book would be one basic one. Personally, I'd want to be able to at least bookmark pages and probably annotate them as well.

Thus far the model is a normal printed book. But of course we're all just a little spoiled by technology. People like me with truly awful handwriting pretty much count these days on having a keyboard or similar device for legible notes. And, unless a new document standard somehow takes over, being able to download PDF's (preferably a lot of them) would be very nice. And battery power should be enough not to make recharging a nuisance.

Sounds like a job for Apple, doesn't it? If only younger consumers were as attached to their reading matter as to their music and videos.

For now, the most recent offering comes from Sony: the Sony Librie. It is said to work in any light, and at any angle. It also has 10 mb of internal memory and can handle 10,000 pages on 2 AA batteries. Otherwise? Well, it uses a proprietary format, for one thing. And it doesn't appear to have any manual input device. So it's still a long way from MY Holy Grail.

Oh, and it's only being made for Japan. Just now. (Which probably means your local upscale electronics place will have it next year.) But if you're a hard core early adopter, you can always get your mitts on one here:

TEXT COLLECTIONS: Explorion

This is yet another on-line collection of text, but with a wrinkle: it's completely focused on travel literature:

AUSTEN: Etymologies

Here's a curious bit of bloggerie for our Austenites:

LA BARRE: Ten years after

For those who don't know this famous 'cause' espoused by Voltaire: in 1765, a cross was mutilated on a bridge in the northern French town of Abbeville. In the ensuing investigation, the young Chevalier de La Barre was arrested. Though his judges knew he probably hadn't struck the cross, they accumulated a potpourri of minor blasphemies (most famously not stopping for a procession) as charges against him and the next year he was tortured and executed. Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary was burned with his body (Voltaire's niece, Mme. De Hornoy, was also friends with La Barre's local cousin, so the philosopher had a double interest in the case.)

Voltaire's involvement, too late to save La Barre, nonetheless raised indignation about the whole affair throughout Europe and helped saved La Barre's co-defendants. So, in the bright light of Voltaire's wisdom, everybody realized a wrong had been done, end of story, right?

Cut to ten years later, when a ceremony was held in Abbeville to replace the mutilated cross with a new one (someone had been carving really slowly...). Louandre, in his Histoire d'Abbeville (II 173-174), describes this ceremony and how it ended: "One of the valets of the Bishop of Amiens burned the works of Jean-Jacques, those of Voltaire and Raynal, while his master blessed the cross with which all participating were equipped."

Ah, the healing power of polemic.