Next step in ebook evolution

[David Britland]

Has anyone considered the irony of the anti-ebook argument being made on the internet, read on a computer screen and typed on querty? ;)

[Guest]

David Britland asked

Has anyone considered the irony of the anti-ebook argument being made on the internet, read on a computer screen and typed on querty?

Well, I did, above . You are all reading this on an ebook reader, and computers that will read ebooks are more or less free, since you can read ebooks on a computer made in 1998.

If you have a smartphone, you have it for non-ebook reading reasons, so you can read your email or access the internet outside your office, but since you've already paid for it, you can put an ebook reader program in it, like Mobipocket.

I actually did drop my Treo and break it, but because it was under warranty, my phone company sent me a new one, no charge, and all the books in it were backed up in my desktop, of course.

[Guest]

The nay-sayers tend to pile on all the bad stories they pick up from all kinds of places and combine them into one completely incorrect picture.

1) e-ink ebook readers do not have hard discs, which removes half of the failures right there.

2) One charge will last you for months with an e-ink screen device. This removes the frequent cycling of your battery which eliminates the other half of the failures.

E-ink devices are therefore bound to be extremely reliable. Of course, any gadget can fail for a number of reasons.

The e-ink screen e-reader I am currently testing doesn't even have an on-off switch because it doesn't drain the battery when no page changes happen.

Best,
Chris....

[Guest]

Regarding failure rates - I have several printed books that have simply disintegrated (old) or fallen apart (poor binding) to the point where I have had to throw them away. Thank goodness I had e-book versions of them otherwise the information would have been lost forever.... ;)

[Guest]

I think the failure rate is really a minor issue. More important is price and visual quality and resolution of the displays.

But even assuming the unlikely scenario that failure rates are or remain fairly high, if price is low enough you just buy another if it fails. To take an extreme example, batteries fail all the time -- in fact they're guaranteed to fail when they run out of juice. But you just buy more because they're cheap. So even if failure rates are high, you have to first consider price to evaluate whether or not that's a big issue.

[Guest]

It's a matter of progress. As soon as e-readers are up to snuff, thy'll be adopted by young technocrats and pooh-poohed by us older Luddites who think such things will steal our souls.

P&L
D

[Guest]

The nay-sayers tend to pile on all the bad stories they pick up from all kinds of places and combine them into one completely incorrect picture.

Oh! Chris, are you begging me to comb through your postings on the benefits of e-books? :eek: :p

CHS

[Guest]

Clay, I would love that.

Best,
Chris....
www.lybrary.com

[Guest]

The best thing about my copy of Greater Magic is that it has no DRM.

I'll give Chris W credit for the open formatting of his e-books, but other digitized magic I've bought has passwords, etc. that makes it cumbersome to use.