If you imagine life aboard a submarine to feel like some sort of 21st-century rendition of serving on the U.S.S. Enterprise or the Deathstar, then you are sadly mistaken. The scarcity of space means that libraries and other forms of vicarious entertainment are extremely limited in size. Worse is the fact that crew members are not allowed to carry conventional e-readers and tablets for fear that the emitted cell signals would reveal the submarine’s location.
Whether to boost morale or prevent the insanity that comes with isolation, the Navy’s General Library Program’s latest initiative will change all that with the Navy eReader Device (NeRD). NeRD is a special-issue E ink tablet resembling a Kindle minus the Internet connectivity, removable storage, or way to add and delete content ─ in short, it’s a hack-proof e-reader. “What would be considered limiting [for] the technology is actually perfecting the device for its designated audience,” says Findaway World, developer of the NeRD and the Navy’s exclusive supplier of audiobooks.
NeRD comes preloaded with a combined 300 eBooks and audiobooks selected from the Navy’s total collection of 108,000. While the selection never changes (as there’s no way of accessing the memory storage short of returning the device to Findaway), it’s packed with classical and contemporary works of fiction from J. R. R. Tolkien, George R. R. Martin, Jane Austen, Shakespeare, James Joyce, as well as nonfiction and heaps of naval history.
The Navy aims to eventually issue a NeRD device to each member in its active fleet, but for initial testing purposes, will limit the first run to a total of 355 units distributed at five per submarine. Unfortunately, the devices will have to be shared by the entire crew, but at least limited exposure is in line with the imposed discipline of military culture.
Via BBC
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