[snarks_when_bored]

How about this? I saw Jeff Bezos in an interview say that the Kindle 2 will hold about 15,000 e-books. Then he quickly pointed out that each e-book will cost $10.00 ( I guess he wanted to reassure publishers). The interviewer didn't pause to point out something rather amazing about these two facts considered together: you could potentially have a Kindle 2 that carried $150,000 worth of books on it! Jeez, that's a serious amount of money. I would think that thieves would find it impossible to resist stealing every one that they could get their hands on.

A $150,000 piece of electronic hardware being carried around town, to the beach, etc.? Insane.

[bcsco]

I use the free e-Book reader available from eReader.com and read my e-Books on my Palm and on an old Pentium 133 laptop running Windows 98SE. I have bought a few e-Books from that source, but most are free e-books downloaded off the net from sites like manybooks.net.

No, I won't be buying a Kindle, or any other device...

[livius]

Most people probably only keep a few books at a time on their device, but aside from that, all the things you buy are also saved in your on-line library so that if you lose your Kindle, you don’t lose all the books you’ve bought. You can download them again at any time.

New books cost about $10.00, btw, while older releases cost about $5.00 and non-copyright things such as classics range from $3.00 to free (at other sites).

In any case, it sure beats trying to carry 15,000 books to the beach with you!

[Anitius Severinus Boethius]

I’ve downloaded around 50 books on my new Kindle 2, and they have all been free so far. Working through old favorites like Verne, Burroughs, Poe, Austen, and Cooper at the moment.

I honestly don’t think most thieves would be interested in $150,000 worth of words, to be honest, so that doesn’t concern me.

I love my Kindle 2.

[hunter112]

Ten bucks for a book is crazy. Since e-books avoid the expense of paper, ink, and carting them all over the country, the real price will settle at about three bucks. That's a buck for the retailer, a buck for the publisher, and a buck for the author.

iTunes is the example for this, if you sell songs cheaply enough, people will buy them. If Bezos tries to get ten bucks per book, there will be a massive incentive to break the encryption on them, and then publishers, authors, and retailers will make zip.

[WorkingClassFilth]

I own somewhere around 4,000 books. Tons of classics, many collectibles, home educator’s library and hundreds of extremely useful ‘how-to’ titles, manuals, trade and craft publications from 1960’s back to the 19th century. These examples of enduring technology will never be phased out - well, careful use and care will ensure about 100-150 years of utility. They’re hell to move, but once installed they work great.

I pity the poor fools that think e-books are books.

[MediaMole]

Very few people will ever fill up a Kindle. It can be de-authorized, making it a brick, rather than an e-book reader and you can back up the e-books to your computer then put them on a new Kindle.

That and the fact that most muggers aren’t big readers.