Marian wrote: <It looks vaguely like a microfilm reader, rather uncomfortable to hold and not the sort of thing you can read in bed, but I assume it was meant as the bookform of the future.>

Called a book-reader, as you said: possibly a contraption that reads books at a distance? The 'books' are electronic (or tarrial-cell) records held in libraries, and the book-reader can access them in a similar if simpler way to Orac reading other computers? What that would mean is you'd only need one book-reader to choose any 'book' in the nearest planet's libraries, and read it from a distance.

I agree, it wouldn't be much good for reading in bed or the bath ...

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