I went to Borders tonight and they had a display with one of the new Sony Portable Readers. This thing was pretty cool. Very thin and light. The display looks like ink and not like your typical video display. Cost is about $350, but you'd think that for that price your get the docking crade and a nice case. No those are extra, you just get a cheap slip cover and a cable. It can hold multible books. The one they had on diplay held about a dozen titles. The e-books cost about $15 each.
No matter how cool it looks, I don't see the sense in these things. Cheaper to buy a real book. Also prefer owning a book I can put on my shelf. Might be better for a cheaper price, maybe to hold an encyclopedia or an big dictionary or other handy refrence books. Then again, you could dod the same with a good PDA.
Posts: 407 | Registered: Mar 2006
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The books themselves need to become cheaper -- on the order of $5 apiece -- for this sort of thing to catch on.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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$350 for someting that reads text? You could get a laptop for $400. I got a smart phone from Cingular on sale for $50.
I have wondered why e-books aren't cheaper. They are definitely cheaper to produce and distribute. Is it to keep the book stores from complaining about losing business?
Posts: 3134 | Registered: Mar 2005
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They are fighting the e-volution as hard, but smarter, than the movie industry and the music industry.
If you have invested millions in paper publishing factories, if your bonus depends on the number of rolls of paper sold, or the number of books put in the store, or the number of covers printed, of if your contract calls for the author to be paid x% of the selling price of the book minus the cost of production and you are the only source for the numbers that lead to the cost of production, then you are motivated to keep things as they are and not allow cheap e-books to be published.
Further, once a book is in almost any e-format it becomes copieable. There is a fear that people will share there books for free and nobody would make money ever again.
Posts: 11895 | Registered: Apr 2002
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I have thought about the Sony reader, but it is to expensive for my taste. It is better for reading than either a PDA or laptop because of the screen. While e-books are to expensive right now...you can get some good deals on fictionwise. Also, many of the books I read are free through project Gutenberg.
I doubt I will get this version, since there are still some bugs to work out...but I like the idea of the e ink technology, and if they keep improving...I might get a future version.
Posts: 1901 | Registered: May 2004
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Honestly, I'm afraid of the disapperance of books.
Are we REALLY comfortable with changing over to a paperless society? A few well targeted EMPs could kill every book written. Or a computer virus. Seems too big a gamble.
My favorite prof ever, in a history class, told us that we don't make paper the same way we used to, which is why we have 2,000 year old books, but the paper we make today will crumble into dust in a hundred years, so basically, every book published in the last century will disappear, unless copied elsewhere.
I'm okay with scanning books into a computer to save them for posterity more easily, but I think there should be a cache of long lived solid books somewhere too. Knowledge, and culture, are too valuable to risk like that.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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I do agree that we should have both. I actually prefer having a physical book to a ebook, but I like the ease of storage, and distribution of ebooks.
I think Project Gutenberg is one of the most amazing things that members of our society has ever done. To put that much knowledge and culture in once place is just amazing...the fact that it is freely available to anyone make it even more amazing.
I do try to get paper versions of older books when I can, like I posted last week I was thrilled when I got a 6 volume set of Dickens's works...but I also think it is great to have access to countless books for free.
Posts: 1901 | Registered: May 2004
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