What with helping search efforts for Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 in the Indian Ocean and spending long months out in the deep seas, we suspect military personnel on US Navy submarines get pretty bored without fun stuff to do.
Pick up a copy of A Game of Thrones to read? Not so easy when there’s limited space for a library onboard a nuclear sub. Whip out a tablet for some light CoconutsKL reading? Nope – commercial tablets and e-readers like the Amazon Kindle are vulnerable to espionage and malicious hacking. To help with that, the US Navy’s designed a proprietary e-reader for its personnel, one that has no internet capability, no removable storage, and absolutely no way to add or delete content. Pretty safe, security-wise, but those sailors won’t be able to download The Winds of Winter when it comes out.
The Verge reports, “What would be considered limiting [for] the technology is actually perfecting the device for its designated audience,” says Findaway World, which built the e-reader. Findaway is also the US military’s exclusive supplier of audiobooks. Each reader is preloaded with 300 books that will never change. The selection includes modern fiction like Tom Clancy and James Patterson, who are popular in the Navy, as well as nonfiction, the classics, and “a lot of naval history.”
That’s all well and good, but the thing that’s caught our eye the most is what the US Navy is calling their spiffy new e-reader: it’s the Navy eReader Device … also known as the NeRD. Way to go, sirs. Way to go.
