Low-tech books for bathtime
It's all we can do to stop ourselves from making bad puns about an impending dot-com bubble bath. Japanese startup Frontier 2000 (even their name is right back there in dotcom-bubble-land), an erstwhile maker of telephone cards that seems intent on lurching from one bad business model to another, has hit on the idea of taking out-of-copyright works and printing them on PVC so you can read them in the bath. Now Japan is famed for its love of a good soak, and has more than its fair share of avid readers, but we're thinking this may be, to put it mildly, a niche market. At ¥1,035 (about $10 US) a book we're not talking bargain-basement, either, though it's a snip compared to the option of vinyl vanity publishing, which'll set you back ¥300,000 (about $2,800 US) for the minimum order of 100 copies of a 100-page text-only work. We'll save our money in the hope that a waterproofed WiFi PC comes out soon, thanks all the same.
[Via Slashdot Japan]
