Well, a good thick paperback costs $7-8 these days anyway. Sure, you’re not paying for the cost of printing, but you are paying for the wireless service through that cost, as well as the other ‘free’ services. It’ll probably/hopefully come down sometime in the near future.
As neat as the Kindle is, I can’t pay $400 for it. There’s gadgets out there with vastly more functionality for the same price. Granted, the Kindle does books very, very well, and a smartphone or other device isn’t going to do them as well, but the rest of the package more than justifies the price. The Kindle’s price isn’t justified. I think I’ll buy one when it hits $250 or thereabout, but not before.
I bought a Sony Reader (PRS-500) when they were offering a $50 special in combination with signing up for a Sony Visa. I had been thinking of getting one for a while but didn’t want to spend full price. The Visa went into a lockbox and the reader has been working great since.
It came with $50 credit toward ebooks, so I did buy some from the Sony store with the credit, but I can’t see myself ordering any more from them. The prices are too high and I don’t use anything that has DRM to lock the content to one device. What makes the device usable is the large amount of free content available and the free tools to convert txt, html, etc to the native Sony format.
So far I love it, the screen looks fantastic and the device is slim and light. The battery lasts a long time and charges quickly. If I were to lose it I would seriously considering paying full price for the new PRS-505 model.
It won’t replace books, but it’s a great complement. I carry it with me on trips instead of a stack of books and save money by grabbing classics from gutenberg.
It’s a matter of time before ebook readers are full color.
It is also only a matter of time before they are touch sensitive and start working as writing pads and drawing boards.
Eventually, as their screens find a way to incorporate both e-ink and “fastflatscreens” advantages, and as battery life increases to 24h+, multitouch interfaces, image quality and cheaper computing power will lead to a merger of eBooks and portable computers.
In the end, we will have a family of “genies” of different screen sizes (ex: 3in, 11in, 14in, 17in, 24in) and horsepower. But they will all do the same basic stuff (note taker, videocamera, music player, voice recorder, cellphone, computer, gps assistant, ad infinitum.) and they will support peripherals, which, in time will end up included in the base model of people’s genies.
So depending on what the circumstances are, one might carry baby genie to use as a basic cell/pda/camera/gps or giant genie which is a full fledged CAD station. The entire genie family will sync/backup with the home supercomputer.
In other words, I figured I ought to buy a kindle to accelerate the inevitable. Sam Stone has got the pricepoints right in my opinion. I’m a deliberate early adopter who can’t wait for version 3.0 of the Kindle.
I don’t have one, but I’ll tell you why I want one…instant gratification. The thought of wanting to read something and being able to download it right away sounds awesome to me.
I’d get one if I were actually in the habit of buying books. As many books as I would buy if I bought books, it would certainly be cost effective.
The problem is, I don’t buy books because my university has a really kick-ass library. My library is practically the Netflix of books. :smack:
And as much as I really like the idea of the Kindle and would jump for joy if one dropped into my lap for free, unfortunately, since I can’t download library books onto it and since library books are free anyway, I’ll have to pass for now.
What would be awesome would be if I could use a Kindle-like device to scan the upc code of the books I already own in order to load them up for free. I’d have no way to prove to the thing I actually own the book though, so too bad.
I want one but I can’t afford it. I love to read in bed but holding the book in one hand can make my hand hurt, plus if you lay on your side, you have to move the book into awkward positions to read the facing pages. A Kindle would also be way more convenient for slipping in a purse and toting around than a book, and if you’re close to the end of your book, you don’t have to tote around a second book so you have something to read once you finish the first one.
That’s all good, but what bothers me the most is that you’re locked into the Kindle for the future. I won’t buy books for a Kindle (and thus, won’t buy a Kindle to read books on) because I’m not interested in losing the investment if Amazon discontinues the service, or if another company makes a better version. I won’t buy DRM’d music for the same reason. Yeah, I’m quite happy with my iPod right now, but there’s no reason to assume that I’ll want my music to only play on Apple-approved devices forever. I think that people who do buy DRMed media with a single vendor point of failure are setting themselves up for extra expense and a lot of anger in the future. Microsoft has already announced that they’re going to discontinue support for their old DRM standard. Even if companies don’t actually discontinue it, you’ll be locked in. Can you imagine forever having to buy hand-held music players from Sony because you liked the Walkman in the 80s?
That said, if the Kindle were cheaper, I might buy one just for the Wikipedia/periodical access. And if the books were priced as rentals, then I wouldn’t care as much about the DRM issues, because I wouldn’t care if I could ever read the book again.
It’s like a magnadoodle, I think. There’s a magnetic ink type of substance that either sits on the surface (forming a dark pixel) in its chamber or it’s pulled the other way leaving the lighter surface. It requires energy to move the substance back and forth, but once it’s there, it stays there without power until moved again. It’s a relatively slow process (compared to pixel change on an LCD) which is why it takes a moment for page turns.
It’s very energy-efficient because it uses reflected light, and it just applies an appropriate electric field to change the state of a pixel, not to sustain it.
hi–i’m new here and thought i’d chime in on the kindle. i got one for my so–he reads around 2-3 books a week. we’ve downsized into a smaller home and don’t have storage space for a lot of books. so after he read a book, he’d end up giving it away. we’re talking like at least $200 a month! (yeah–i know–but he claims libraries don’t have the ones he wants). so i got him the kindle last year when they first came out. he loves that thing better than me! he takes it with him all the time. amazon does keep a media library of all the books you’ve purchased, so if the kindle were to die or whatever you still have the books. also, only new releases are $10. some older ones are much less, and some more specialized books (medical, etc.) are much more expensive. i’m probably going to break down and get one for myself.
I don’t participate in the activity, but I know the DRM code for all iTunes music has already been hacked, and if you want your music unlocked there are ways to do it. Hell, iTunes is already going out of there way to sell music that is unlocked and of higher quality. I am certain that a hacked version of the same for DRM books is either already here or on the way. If the day comes where Amazon goes under or the service for Kindle is discontinued, I’m sure I’ll be able to get my media one way or the other.
I have a moto 9m replacing my treo 650. You can have it when you pry it from my dead fingers. It has a 4 gig micro sd chip, and right now I have the movie M, about a gig of music and about 150 books on it. I also have a great blackmail vid of about 30 seconds of mrAru holding the car cradled in his arms like a baby making woogie sounds at her and sort of bounce dancing her.
He got it as an early birthday present for me because they didnt know if I would have to be kept over night at the hospital, and he didnt want me to go into SD or email withdrawl, and Id be able to read pretty much anything in my favorites library, or even go online and watch a movie if I wanted=)
I mainly get my books from fictionwise, ebooks.com and baen [webscriptions.net] For Webscriptions, you get 3-5 books for $15.00 [they put out a monthly package] or you can buy a single book for $5. I also have mobi pocket publisher and can turn pretty much any text, rtf, word or html doc into a mobipocket format doc so I also have a bunch of stuff from Gutenberg. I kep about 100 books that are my standard favorites, and change out the other 50 or so about 1ce a month. I read a lot, and I read very fast. If I didnt have my moto, I would have to lug around 2 or 3 different books a day if I am out and running errands and have a doctors appointment.
