Oz bookshop to deliver by drone An Australian university textbook rental outfit called Zookal has promised to deliver its wares by drone. Zookal has teamed with another Sydney startup, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) outfit Flirtey, to deliver books. Customers order books using their smartphone and once loaded Flirtey's drone homes in on that device thanks to …
The hexacopter drone homes in on the customer's location based on the customer phone's GPS (either continous or as recorded at the time of the order). Does the hexacopter control centre know about power pylons, telephone poles, high buildings, etc? Does it know how to open doors, etc? This could be the start of some hilarious You Tube videos.
I recognise sarcasm when I see it (as well as many other things). Do they have a map of every lamp post and flagpole and overhead cable? Will students never run behind a newly installed crane (or whatever) so they can get a YouTube worthy video of a drone fragmenting itself? Will students order a book and then drive around in cars or on bikes for the fun of seeing the drone trying to keep up with them? I know I would, but maybe that's just me.
Clearly it has a way to go, and textbooks is the silliest of starting points, but an independent delivery network that doesn't get caught in traffic isn't a bad idea for certain classes of goods. Vaccines between hospital campuses could be a time when you'd want fast point to point delivery.
It's just a modern carrier pigeon that eats fossil fuels as opposed to grain.
"Are we expecting congestion? Cue the downvotes."
Nope, it's just that whenever Air Force One is about, air traffic is halted.
Ground traffic as well.
I had a buddy once escorted off of a house roof that was five miles from where the POTUS was to pass by at gunpoint.
He was there, working for a large corporation, installing a television antenna for a customer.
No eReader is suitable yet to properly replace Text books. Novels are great. Reference works can be OK if done properly (A PDF of images of scanned book is painful).
Also the regular size kindle is too small for text books. If I get the now re-appeared Kindle DX**, I will test it,
Need easier annotation, better bookmarks*, goto by click on place on bar representing "depth" of book so you can flip into via "binary tree" like search as you would do on a paper one when you know roughly the location but not page number.
*Maybe show the Favourite Bookmarks as icons on a bar representing the depth of book.
BTW, Apple, I designed all this in 1987, so don't bother trying to patent it.
(** is re-released DX a newer screen like Paper White? Amazon site seems vague)
Mines the one with a Kindle paper white in the pocket.
Well I just ordered the new version of Kindle DX. 1/3rd price of a top iPad, but no competition to a Tablet. It might compete well with paper textbooks, scanned books and A4 PDFs on a 1600 x 1200 laptop. I may save a lot on laser printing. Print to PDF and copy via USB to Kindle DX.
I'll not rush into buying text books till the eVersions are a LOT cheaper than dead tree versions.
It is a shite idea. Even in the outback they have trees or shrubs that would certainly make the drone landing or takeoff liable to failure. Plus the distances involved are massive so I don't know what kind of magic battery technology they are considering
Plus given that anything more valuable than an old bike is locked up in most places in the earth I don't see how they will stop people stealing what will be very valuable pieces of kit
"You mean a 1kg payload like a couple of books? You mean an open space like the Outback? So you mean the plan would work exactly as described, but apart from that it's mince? Yeah, good point."
yup, payload fine.... open space like the outback... if bookshop also in middle of outback, and a max distance of about 3 miles from book buyer...
no ?
then it's mince.
"Of course it's already possible to have books delivered to a smartphone: Amazon's Kindle app is available on iOS, Android, Windows Phone and even BlackBerry while the Nook app works on the first three OSes mentioned."
Kindle is great for novels, but it is terrible for any book where you might want to keep track of more than the page you are reading. Where with a paper book, it's simple to keep a finger on a page with a useful table, diagram, etc., with Kindle you have to keep skipping back and forth with multiple page-turns or clumsy dialogs.
"Of course it's already possible to have books delivered to a smartphone: Amazon's Kindle app is available on iOS, Android, Windows Phone and even BlackBerry while the Nook app works on the first three OSes mentioned."
Drones delivering physical books don't triple the price the way ebooks do.
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