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Emerald City #59, July 2000, surveyed the e-book world and found, in despair, a melange of various incompatible platforms and formats. Pocket PCs running Windows CE were available and portable, but who would want a computer with no CD drive? Dedicated e-book readers were available, but expensive and had compatibility problems. Laptops worked okay, but PDF was a really annoying format to try to scroll through since it was set up for book pages. To her credit, the editor did not predict that things would improve much anytime soon.
Having survived passage through the tail of Halley's Comet on May 18, the people of Earth turned their efforts to launching the brave new travel method of the future: commercial airships. The first ones, entering service in June 1910, simply served as excursion vehicles, intended to fly around for a few hours and then return to their home base. In Germany, the inaugural flight of Count Zeppelin's Deutschland, carrying 23 journalists and a stock of champagne and caviar, set off for a flight over the scenic Wupper Valley, only to be met by a storm and wind up crashing in a forest.
Slightly better luck was had in Switzerland, where the Ville de Lucerne successfully completed 21 trips carrying paying passengers in its first month of service.
1010 saw the completion of the Shahnameh or "Book of Kings" by the Persian poet Hakim Abul-Qasim Mansur, later known as Ferdowsi Tusi. 30-some years in the making, it was an epic history of Persia from the dawn of time up to the 7th century.
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