I wanted to make a new thread as I was writing my reply to this post, because I do not want to hijack that other thread.
jamkaraoke @ Fri Apr 03, 2009 10:11 am wrote:
(isn't this about the time someone makes a post about elctronic books ) 
I have my girlfriend working on that actually. My songs are way too disorganized for singers to look them up on their own, but once she finishes organizing them for me (hopefully this will take about another month of her spare time; I am buying her a new laptop as payment when she is done.) I always organize my new songs the same way now, and I fill in the ID3 tags in the MP3 file.
I am going take two old computers out of my garage, buy cheap monitors, keyboards, and mice, and put them at one bar I work at. We have room for it where the computers will be safe behind a half-wall (old DJ booth) and only the screens / keyboards / mice will be vulnerable to beer spills. I am going to put a pair of headphones on one computer so people can even preview the song, but if the headphones get broken easily or customers stand there at that computer and sing, distracting the singers on the stage, I will probably not do the headphones anymore.
As far as making this portable, I am not sure exactly what to do about it yet. My partners and I talked about maybe buying some iPods and just loading the MP3 files of our karaoke songs onto them, but how do you keep the iPods from getting stolen? It would be the perfect cheap little device if it weren't for that.
I have also thought about putting the computers in an ordinary 19" rack and placing the monitors and such on a table next to it, but in this case the computers would be exposed to accidental spills.
Finally, there are wireless USB/VGA systems for a couple hundred dollars, so I have thought about doing that also. If they have even 20 feet of range, I could put the computers inside my regular equipment cases and then set the screens and keyboards wherever I want to -- all they would need is an extension cord.
Maybe this sounds like a dumb idea, but I get like 100 new songs a month via subscriptions, I'm sure you guys do too, so that is a lot of new pages to keep putting in the "updates" section of a book; and I hate books anyway. My singers are used to just writing their song and I look it up for them on my computer. If they do not know what they want to sing, though, my books are not up-to-date and singers need inspiration. Plus books get lost (one of my partners had his books stolen once by a rival KJ!) and torn up. A computer, you can just re-image the hard drive if it gets screwed up, and keeping its song list updated is not any more difficult than updating your backup hard drive.
Oh, as far as software goes, we are going to use the same karaoke program I use anyway. I don't know how to "secure" Windows, so I will just not connect the computers to the Internet so dumb rednecks won't go and use the computers to look at porn or whatever.