And Mellowknees, I couldn’t agree more, especially if you’re already buying the more costly paper format.

Another question no one here bothered to answer back when it was anounced. This is troubeling in light of Amazon’s documented disregard of writers and publishers plus its labor policies and union busting activities.

Care to comment BB?

I’ve played with various ebook readers in stores and got a Sony PRS 700 about a year ago — but what really works is the iPad. Trying to read PDFs on the Sony just doesn’t work but on the iPad it works brilliantly. And having a full colour touchscreen, plus all the other apps (most being quite cheap to buy) makes it more useful in many ways than ebook reader competitors.

Other ebook readers will need to do at least as much as an iPad, at least with regard to ebooks, PDFs, etc., if they want to have any lasting power in the market.

I really hope that publishers (particularly of textbooks and nonfiction) grab this golden opportunity to sell PDF versions of their books as I could easily see iPads or something similar becoming standard for academic work. Carrying an iPad filled with dozens or even hundreds of textbooks with full search capabilities (and maybe even with multimedia components built into them) would beat carrying printed textbooks any day.

Yet I also LOVE my iPad book reader, as I have come to discover over the years that some books are just not worthy to sit in my library. So I buy these disposable books electronically. Often they are popular culture and “summer reads”.

If I find I’m really loving the book I’m reading via iPad then I’ll usually just buy it and add to the analogue collection. This equals less crap more prized chunks of lit to lend or covet.

Win Win. My collection doesn’t get bloated with books of fleeting interest, and I get to read even more crud that I may have passed on due to my limited and prized library space.

Zeros and Ones rule!

Here’s the obligatory link to a recent blog post I made about this exact subject

http://www.mikesilverman.com/redletterday/2010/07/paper-please/

Fundamentally, there are too many weaknesses to e-books (DRM, incompatible formats, bizarre pricing) to overcome the real strengths of print (more choice, lasts longer, the pleasure of collecting)

VS.

Downloading it off the internet onto my iPad/Kindle. That same book on iBooks costs less then 12USD.

For a heavy reader overseas, it really isn’t much of a decision. I think ebooks can still be cheaper than they currently are, though.

RMG

They’ve fucked over too many of my friends. I’ll buy from brick & mortar stores, or from Barnes & Noble online.

I’m also waiting for medical books to go cheaper and I will buy those too. One day i may get rid of my bookcases hehe.

The loss of rights and added limitations needs to come with a lower price. It is an inferior product after all.

As much as I like real paper-and-glue books, I don’t miss adding to the weight of the STUFF I have to carry around whenever I move.

Frankly this doesn’t surprise me, just look at the prices. New release fiction is being sold at softcover prices in electronic editions while the price of hardcovers is showing no signs of coming down. With this kind of price differential of course the switch to digital is going to happen faster for hardcover fiction.

It’s not as nice as real books in some ways, that new book feeling (or the other, lovely, old book muskiness) is missing. It’s (supposedly) impossible to share books among your friends (yeah, sure). Furthermore, when reading novels I find that most novels don’t lose anything by being in electronic format.
I’ve even bought from Amazon, and was very pleased at being able to get that book instantly.
If they give me a hassle if I want to move it to other devices, well, there’s always a torrent available somewhere..

I buy books from a local bookseller, who is willing to order anything I ask for (from Girl Genius comic books to the fragments of Posidonius in library edition).

Greg pays local taxes which support my community infrastructure (including roads, schools, and firemen) and he’s a member of the community swimming pool my kids use and the local Better Business Bureau and he buys food from local vendors which helps keep the market open and competitive.

When I’ve finished reading a book, I either shelve it for re-reading later, or I donate it to the local school library. When they are done with it, they sell it for a quarter from a table on the sidewalk and use the money to buy ice cream for the kids once a year at the reading festival.

I certainly understand why you’d buy from Amazon if you don’t have a real local bookstore. I bought my signed copies of Zelazny & Bode from Amazon, and I buy other things (like chain saw guards) that I can’t get locally.

But personally I prefer to be part of a functional, cyclic ecosystem of readers and reading rather than a dead-ended sump.

It does (if you use MobiPocket) do dictionary lookups but I’ve found I only actually want them for foreign or old English words, you know words that aren’t actually in the dictionary…

Also the Bookeen has no pointless keyboard, I’ve never had the urge to made a note on a book in my life so, for me, that keyboard is really useless. One of the guests in the hotel I’ve been working at had a kindle, when he got it he though he’d use the keyboard to make notes for bible studies and in his own words “It’s too little and fiddly, it’s far quicker to write the notes in another book”…

Oh and if you’re thinking of getting an ereader then you’ll really want Calibre, it’s a really great ebook manager that can translate and tag files and even downloads news for your reader.

So basically I, and many others, love ereaders but the kindle is actually a pretty crap one.

I still prefer paper, and I suspect we’ll have both for a while.

Note to Amazon customers: You don’t OWN Kindle books, you license them.

Sorry for any confusion.

The ones with nice, sharp readouts don’t have a touchscreen and stylus for highlighting and annotation. The one (Sony Touch) that does have a touchscreen has glare issues which would, I think, play havoc with my increasingly poor vision. ASUS apparently has a clearer touchscreen something-or-other coming out eventually, but no word on the cost. I’ve heard conflicting reports about whether or not the iPad lets you annotate books, but it’s out of my price range anyways. And no one building a serious annotated ‘lifetime’ academic library wants to get stuck with DSM/proprietary issues, either. Furthermore, a number of these products aren’t even available/supported outside of the US.

There’s a HUGE worldwide market of students and academics to whose needs no product yet seems to cater, something which baffles me.