The grocery store down the street from my employer’s main offices has a tea room just inside the entrance. I stopped by this afternoon on the way to a meeting to grab a quick sandwich and coffee for lunch.
The woman at the table in front of me was reading on a Sony eReader. I haven’t seen many of those “in the wild” here in Switzerland. As I was finishing my lunch, she put it away to take a look at the newspaper, like the man at the far table.
I was reading about Cory Doctorow’s Firestarter talk on my phone, so just under half of the patrons at that hour were alone and reading over coffee.
The well-prepared mind 
It’s Sherry Turkle’s prediction. She’d be horrified! I often see people do that in cafes everywhere…and sometimes I think the number of ebook readers on the tube is mindblowing. Heh. Probably nothing compared to the US! Thank you for the link by the way :)
You’re very welcome. I enjoyed reading your post about the event. I was secretly hoping he’d said something about built-in hardware controls and privacy, but it seems that he didn’t.
He did talk about howe we don’t have cars anymore (just computers we ride in), not airplanes but Solaris boxes and SCADA controllers. Highlighted the fact that 3D printers aren’t devices, just peripherals connected to computers. Then how radio has changed and instead of being a crystal, it’s a general purpose computer connected to an analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converter.
I have the audio I can put on audioboo if you’d like :) I haven’t listened to it properly though so can’t vouch for quality. Maybe will get the chance to do it tomorrow!
He’s definitely right about cars, heh. I’ve been wondering for some time now when garages are going to start hiring IT employees to perform automotive service in addition to regular mechanics. Let me know if you have time to put the audioboo up. That’d be great!
Here it is! The audio is ok it turns out – yay iPhone :-)
Thanks Andrea, the SoundCloud of the talk is well worth listening to.