[MrEdd]

The article is long, but engaging in its detail of how the print media in general is now being dragged down the digital path that the RIAA futilely fought against.

[MrEdd]

Ping for tech and death of dead tree print.

[ShadowAce]

[TChris]

My wife LUUUVs her Kindle. It was my Christmas present to her.

Sony/Amazon got this one 95% right. There are a few gripes, but the display is phenomenal and the battery lasts for days and days, not just a few hours.

Only gripes: Hard to hold it without pushing a button somewhere; Clicking hotlinks on converted documents sometimes doesn't work very well at all; Reference books don't work well on it, but plain ol' reading is superb

Overall, excellent device!

[IronJack]

Bookmark

[TopDog2]

I love my Kindle. Plenty of non-DRM books available for it too.

[Richard Kimball]

I’ve currently got about 25 books on my iPhone. I owned the iPhone anyway, and found one app with 18 classics (99 cent download) and another with 10 books for 99 cents. All are public domain, but there are more and more coming out.

[Tribune7]

ping

[Señor Zorro]

Interesting. I personally do not like to read on the computer. I find it more tiring on the eyes, less convenient (I can’t sprawl out on a couch, for example, even with a laptop), and less pleasant (there is something about the change of pace I like in reading a book; I use a computer all day at work and sometimes at play—books provide a nice way to get away from it all). This isn’t to say, of course, that I haven’t done it. Particularly with harder to find books, I have used gutenberg, archive, and sacred-texts. I just don’t like it as well.

Maybe a reader would be better. I don’t know. At the moment, I am not really inclined to try it, though. :)

[steve-b]

Meh. Get back to me when there’s an e-book reader with a photo-level color display.

[TChris]

Some of the cool features of the Amazon Kindle:

• Device holds hundreds of books, more if you add a memory card
• Battery lasts for days between recharging; My wife recharges hers every two or three weeks, just to top it off
• Adjustable font size (try THAT with your paperback)
• Download new books over FREE wireless connection (uses Sprint phone network, not Wi-Fi) in a minute or so (No worries about book store being out of stock, closed, too far away, etc..)
• Plays MP3 music files too, if you like to have music while you read
• Your Kindle has an email address; you can send converted documents to it by email
• Add notes, automatically backed up for you
• Free wireless Wikipedia access

[hawkboy]

I think Amazon could have come up with a better name for their device...”Kindle” makes me think of “Fahrenheit 451” and burning books.
Kind of gives me the creeps.

[rwfromkansas]

I love anything computer and digital, but I just can’t get myself to read a book on an e-reader device.

They just don’t look as good as a real book...resolution, the light coming off the screen like a computer screen etc.

Just don’t like that.

Are there some good ones out there that are easy on the eyes like a real book?

[antiRepublicrat]

For a book reader I want something like an iPhone, just with a paperback-sized screen. Even get rid of the button. I want something that only has a thin border around, just like a paperback.

I want the ability to make notes, see them on the page, and be able to get an index of all notes, where clicking one takes you to the page where you wrote it, or just pops up the surrounding text right there.

I want to be able to synch my notes wirelessly to anybody who has the same device and book, and to have them synch back to my computer.

I don’t want mandatory DRM. A publisher can DRM (loosely like iTunes does), but I don’t want the books I got from Project Gutenberg to be automatically DRMed like the Zune did when transmitting.

I want to be able to give books to friends wirelessly. At least some intro chapters if it’s DRMed, the whole thing if not.

I want it to have enough memory to hold an entire library. Gonna need at least 32 GB.

It should be able to do audiobooks with the option of auto-flipping pages to where the sound is, and even hilighting the words or sentences as it goes (great for beginning readers).

I’ll think of more later, but that’s my minimum for finally buying an ebook reader.

[CaptRon]

I’ve been reading books on my Palm for years.

[Billthedrill]

I find it a little surprising that the author seems to have missed one other aspect of this new world - the content owner doesn't have to be the publishers. An individual who can sell his car on the Internet can sell books too. It is little wonder that conventional publishers were reluctant to advance this technology - pace the author, they recognized a nascent competitor.

What they do to make a living is vet, purchase, and edit the material, do the publicity, manage the physical shipment in both directions, and of course run factories that produce the product. What they'd be left with is the publicity part and maybe some preparation. If it looked to them like a less profitable proposition, it was.

Personally I'm reluctant to saddle myself with one more piece of electronic crapola to carry around. I've tried the PDA thing and found I couldn't scroll down as fast as I read, so a dedicated reader may be inevitable. Not tomorrow for me, anyway, but soon. What the heck - I already spend 12 hours a day in front of a computer monitor.

[Tunehead54]

Reference bump ... ;-)

[SunkenCiv]

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	Gods Graves Glyphs	My view is, these devices should be replacing all textbooks soon. In fact, textbooks should be published electronically, and not in hardcopy. It would make education more economical among other things. Imagine toting all your textbooks plus other needed texts in one lightweight package, which includes full text search, personally annotating, etc. This is a Pages topic. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother, and Ernest_at_the_Beach
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[SamAdams76]

Now when we can get Free Republic on Kindle, that would be something. I would definitely buy a Kindle then.

[cyborg]

I am all for e-books especially in school. Most of my textbooks from nursing school were a huge waste of trees. In fact, my cat is having fun batting them around the basement floor till I pick them up. I still like reading trade paperbacks though. I’ve never take my palm pilot (or future Apple iphone) to the beach or the worse yet...the sauna.

[Dustbunny]

Sounds good.

Shame that it costs about $300. more than we could ever afford.

The written word from the library is the only way we can go.