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Knowledge Workers? Nah, bunch of illiterate yobs...

I haven't before met anybody who said they didn't want an e-Book "because they don't like books" - but the audience I was talking to yesterday was of one voice in rejecting the whole idea of a book - any book.

The other thing I didn't know before yesterday, was that the seat in front of the exit row seat by the window in an Airbus 380 is a dud. And finally, I didn't know quite how fast that said Airbus could make the journey from Lisbon to London in an emergency!

No, the audience weren't a bunch of alienated teens: they were the erudite knowledge workers in the audience of the Phama-Bio-Med International Institute for Information Professionals. I was chairing a session on e-book technology at the conference, which (as you can see from the details) was held in Lisbon.

"Why would I care?" was the response from several to the proud announcement by book publisher Springer that they had made their entire scientific and educational canon available as e-books.

It became apparent that these guys are living way ahead of the rest of us. When they want a bit of information (which they all refer to as Knowledge) they go for that bit of information. The question of "which book was that published in?" is not a question these web-enabled, database driven pros have aseked themselves for years. All of them sit in front of powerful PCs 24 by 7, and the people they work with (the pharma-medical experts) do the same.

The concept of a book is, nonetheless, a useful one. This isn't the place for the dissertation (yes, I'll do it later, fear not!) but just think about this: suppose you had to keep track of the books, as a sort of e-librarian - and you had to keep track of all the marginal scribbles written in every book, and know who wrote them? and who is supposed to be allowed to see these scribbles, and (much more important!) who they were supposed to be hidden from?

Anyway, the organisers, having discovered that I was on a fee for this, felt that I was obviously one of those "time equals money" top bods, and booked me on flights into and out of Lisbon on the same day. Rather a lousy commute at the best of times, but this was the flight from hell.

The flight out was ruined by the fact that I was sitting in front of the window seat. That means that my seat wouldn't recline. But the guy in front of me - his seat would! And he was (wouldn't you know?) the only chap on the plane who wanted to sleep for the 160 minutes of the flight. So I couldn't use my notebook computer.

And when I got onto the plane to come home, I was turfed off. "There's a smoke detector gone off in the luggage hold," said the airline. They had to set off the fire extinguisher, take all the luggage out, fill in an hour's worth of paperwork, and finally, get permission to fly into Heathrow after normal flying hours.

So the pilot filled right up with fuel, and put the hammer down, and we made it in less than two hours, flying at 38,000 feet, and literally with the throttle open wide the whole way. I was impressed!

I'll post more about the e-book phenomenon at www.afaics.com in a day or so.