Sony has teamed up with Google to challenge the Kindle in the e-book wars. [Yawn] Yeah it’s nice that you can read Google’s entire public domain library on it but the reader itself still costs over $300 dollars.
Look! These days, for $300 you can get an actual computer. Here’s what I expect in an e-book reader: I want one for 100 dollars or less that’s roughly the size of a mass market paperback and that will let me read any text file, PDF or any other damn kind of file that anyone in the history of the world has ever come up with for displaying words on a screen. And of course I want to be able to connect it to my PC and download stuff as effortlessly as using a flash drive. Until you (Sony, Amazon and anyone else who makes these things) can do that just go away and don’t bother me anymore.
Thanks, Glenn.
March 27th, 2009 - 5:33 pm
I have a number of concerns regarding the digital book-readers (some of them more tinfoil-hat worthy than others), but the issue of inter-compatibility is the biggest one. I keep thinking of Betamax and videodisks and the like – and what if a person buys the “wrong” format, the “loser” in the format wars? Then you’re stuck with an expensive device that works with a limited amount of “software”
With actual books, they remain compatible forever provided you can read the language they’re in (and they don’t crumble into dust, like some of the WWII era paper backs I have that are made of that terrible high-acid paper). I have files I wrote less than 15 years ago that I cannot open now either because of data decay (parts of my dissertation on disk are irretrievably lost) or because changes in format have made them obsolete. (Thank goodness I have a bound paper copy of my dissertation, and that microfilm copies exist).
But I have a (few) books published 100 years before I was even BORN, and I can open them up and read them, no problem at all.
“Book” is a good solid technology and I doubt it will soon be replaced.
March 28th, 2009 - 1:31 pm
You’re reading a book, you drop it, you pick it up and continue reading. You’re reading a Kindle, you drop it … where’s the nearest trash can?
March 28th, 2009 - 9:09 pm
I do prefer real books. I’m mainly interested in an e-book reader for the public domain books that are already out there on the Internet. I have read whole books online before but it’s sort of hard to take a desktop PC to bed with you.