Word: xeroxers
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...they worth it? To find out, I ordered the latest $99 printers available from Canon, Epson, Hewlett-Packard, Lexmark and Xerox. Then I tested them for ease of use, speed and--most important--print quality on everything from e-mails and memos to photos and cartoons. Hundreds of printouts and several desperate calls to technical-support staff later, Epson's Stylus Color 777 and Xerox's DocuPrint M750 were my favorites, although neither was perfect...
Reinventing the book? It's not the kind of thing you'd expect to find preoccupying even the most eccentric inventor's mind. Yet Xerox PARC (it stands for Palo Alto Research Center) is the kind of place that prides itself on overturning assumptions. For one, there are no lone nuts tinkering away in silent labs. Teamwork takes priority here--and as history suggests, there's nothing more powerful than the feedback effect of inventors riffing off one another's work...
...record of holding onto them has been spotty at best. The mouse, the GUI (graphical user interface, like Windows) and arguably the PC itself were all born in this hothouse of Silicon Valley R. and D.; they ended up making a lot of money for Apple and Microsoft. Xerox has got a lot of prestige but little cash out of the PARC, which is why the beleaguered copier giant intimated in October that it would put its crown jewel up for sale to help stem billion-dollar losses...
Gold's RED team seems to have reached the same conclusion: it's O.K. to skim, and it's O.K. to read pictures instead of text. Its Hyperbolic Reader (based on the hyperbolic tree, a Xerox PARC invention) tells a children's story in Perspective Wall style. Cartoons and speech bubbles grow large as you move a joystick over them, then shrink as you turn to another part of the story's tree. In Fluid Fiction (also created with PARC software), another children's story is told in just 24 sentences. But touch the end of any sentence...
...those lumps of paper on our shelves have been sacred in this form for very long. It's less than 200 years since the arrival of the novel, and less than 100 since the average best seller came with illustrations. The brave new world of reading under construction at Xerox PARC may be only the latest step in the book's evolution. The more forms it can mutate into, the more likely it is that one of those forms will survive in an age of intensive information foraging and visual literacy. And if that form happens to be Speeder Reader...