Mine's the best, and that's that.
Posted on 08/15/2010 10:15:27 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
The trend was confirmed by Apple Inc.'s iPad, but I need to be more adept at spotting the trend when it is beginning and in the wild.
I missed the signals, twice. You look to the public-at-large to spot trends, not to pundits.
Two examples come to mind. First, I was on a flight to Michigan around the time of the first Kindle announcement and was roaming the aisle of the jet when I saw one of the flight attendants reading off of an e-reader, which turned out to be the Sony device.
I asked her how she liked it and had to listen to endless raves. She loved to read. The reader had a ton of her books and she could picks and choose what she wanted based on her mood. It worked great. It was lightweight. She went on and on.
Then I find a friend of mine -- who is not even much of a reader -- with a Kindle. All he could do was talk about how great it was.
This sort of public review should not be ignored. These are not tech geeks who buy everything and think anything with a transistor in it is God's gift to mankind. These are real people.
So the e-reader is here to stay in one form or another.
(Excerpt) Read more at marketwatch.com ...
Behold ‘The Amazon Effect’: Now Murdoch’s Gunning for the $10 E-Book
I won't buy an e-reader until the price of e-books drops. Precipitously :)
A decent reader these days will have note taking and highlighting built in. Above that I’d like to see voice notes — select your text and talk to have it saved as an mp3 (or AAC or whatever) and hooked to that bit of text. Get a ToC of your comments, showing chapter, page and a text excerpt, touch to listen. Extra credit if the system automatically runs speech recognition and saves and indexes the text for later searching.
I've seen that. I've also seen a textbook written by family of the head of a department and, presto, it becomes the required textbook for that course. They could charge whatever they wanted because they had a captive audience.
The forthcoming tablets based on the Android OS (a good thing, sorry google haters) should have its voice recognition technology built in to actually transcribe your voice notes to text if you want.
Personally I am holding off as long as I can stand it before buying anything in this category. I think the eReaders will drop as low as $99 by Christmas and the tablets that also have eInk screens are just around the corner.
The suspense is terrible. I hope it lasts.
If only you could get the patent on that!
She must have about 60 books on the Kindle now. I have the Kindle app for the Mac on my laptop and the iTouch app. The great thing is that they'll all sync up. If I read up to Chapter 32 on the laptop and fire up the iTouch to read in bed... the iTouch will go straight to Ch. 32!
Kindle has some free word games available for download, too.
I probably could. Patents are one reason I write stuff like that. This way if someone else ever decides to patent stuff that I think is obvious, then that posting would be "prior art" to kill the patent.
smart!
Mine's the best, and that's that.
I bought a Kindle for my son when he was on a recent deployment overseas on a ship. He did/does nothing but rave about how great it is. We are both avid readers and I am thinking about getting the Kindle for myself now. My son loved it. He had access to so many different venues of reading. Just my 2 cents...
You might want to check into Calibre. It is free and can be used to convert to and from a variety of formats.
MY daughter works in the bookstore of a medium sized Calif university and she says printed book sales have fallen off a cliff. They are Apple retailers and were just given the OK to sell the iPad. They actually stock Macs and had the highest sales of schools their size plus she says students and faculty have been requesting the iPad...
If I wanted the e-reader that’s easiest on my eyes, I’d wait for Apple to move its retina display to the iPad. My biggest problem for long reading on e-readers is pixellation, and the anti-aliasing to get over that isn’t too easy on my eyes either. They’re just not as sharp and clear as a well-printed book. A 10” retina display would be sweeeet.
Yes indeed! I primarily want an eReader but I want one that will let me play around with other stuff.
It just seems like tablets, netbooks and eReaders will converge in less than a year. And since I am far from rich I can entertain myself with the notion that I am just waiting for the technology to mature while not buying anything until the costs come down.
That's what I tell myself, anyway.
Any savvy professor should immediately convert his small volume publication over to an eReader format that uses DRM. Change the “purchase” of a book to a license that expires in a year. Charge another fee for the student if they want to keep the textbook (bet it won't happen often).
Charge $100 instead of $150 for course materials, and the only people who lose are the copy center staffers and owners.
BTW, you can stop buying stock in vanity presses.
Which readers and a PC version available, that I can try out on my home computer and laptop?
Do they sync up smoothly with an eReader?
Can I have more than one copy of a purchased book?
Which readers and a PC version available, that I can try out on my home computer and laptop?
Do they sync up smoothly with an eReader?
Can I have more than one copy of a purchased book?
Those of you who are science fiction fans might want to check out the Baen Free Library. They have a ton of their current books online for free. It's a great way to check out new authors without shelling out bucks to do so. I highly recommend the 1632 series. One thing that I think is really cool, is that some of their hardback books come with a CD that contains a bunch of their other books. For instance, we recently bought the latest Honor Harrington novel in hardback, and the CD contained the entire series up to the current book! (of course we already had most of them as dead-tree editions) Most of the books are available in whatever format you like.
Just like real books, eh?
I absolutely agree about the size issue. The biggest problem I have with the iPad is that it is too darned big for me to put in my pocket. I love the big, beautiful screen, but as an ebook reader it is really a bit much. Granted, it does a lot more than just read books, but I really like my little cheap reader that's a little smaller and much thinner than a paperback.
One warning: With a book you know you can keep it forever, no matter what, nobody's taking it from you. Amazon has shown it can and will revoke your purchases if desired, and there's nothing you can do about it. You will of course get your money back, but the idea that they can and will remotely wipe a book from my system is disturbing. This may be true for any protected-format e-books.
Yup. Don't like that "feature" at all. File formats need to be standardized, but I'll never accept a file format that has DRM built into it. One thing I like a lot about my cheap aluratek ereader is that it will read anything. File format should be a consumer choice, not something crammed down your throat for the benefit of publishers or the reader manufacturer.
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