Posted on 12/31/2010 4:42:35 PM PST by Swordmaker
Agreed on all points. But I still have a Kindle too.
King Arthur Flour makes the best bread, hands down. You just have to try it and then you will know.
Borders is by far the most liberal big-box bookstore out there ... so good riddance. Barnes&Noble has definitely also suffered from the Amazon E-Book effect but they at least got their heads out of the sand and brought out the Nooks to compete with the Kindle. I just got the Color Nook for X-Mas. Absolutely love it as I specifically wanted something I could not only read books on but also be able to read color comic books. Already took it on the road and I am very pleased with it.
I, for one, will NEVER own/read an e-book.I always said the same thing, but I recently found a book I wanted to read that was only available as an ebook. I finally took the plunge and bought a Kindle.
This is going to become more and more common, until in several years the only books being printed on dead trees will be best sellers and Oprah's Book Club picks. All other books will be available only as ebooks. More and more authors are discovering that they can make a better living self-publishing ebooks at $2 than they were making by having a publisher print dead-tree books and selling them for $9-$25. This is great news for authors and readers, but a disaster for publishers.
I have a Kindle. I didn’t use it until I injured my knee last winter and getting to the library was simply impossible. I love it now. If I finish a book in the middle of the night I go downstairs and order a new one. In seconds-there it is.
Amazon also has a killer selection.
I can find out of print books for pennies on the dollar...sometimes, for literally just *pennies* plus the $3.99 shipping...:)
Does your Borders now or have they ever in the past, fancy themselves as a “beat coffee house”?
For quite a while, every Friday night ours was filled with the caterwauling of some wanna be hippy, strumming away on their poorly tuned guitar or even worse, just “singing” a cappella.
I learned to avoid the place on Fridays but when my luck was not so good, I guarantee those nights were my fastest trips in and out of Borders *ever*.
The poor clerks who were forced to be there during those “dueling mating chalkboard fests” looked like they were seconds away from suicide.
Of late, the worst thing I’ve had to endure was a “Harry Potter” night.
We were coming home around midnight and I noticed Borders was still open.
Naturally, I whined the truck to a stop and went in to find people [adults, not so many children] all dressed like HP characters, slithering around the store like a slow motion psycho-circus.
I didn’t stay long because standing shoulder to shoulder with people who had fake stuffed rats and owls affixed to their shoulders was even too weird for me.
I’m also annoyed that the Christianity section now dwells right next to the Satanism/Buddhism/Wiccan/New Age section.
As if.
“...low-power persistent papyrus high-resolution displays...”
LOL! Love it! :)
That’s true. If it’s something you need and it’s only available electronically, then that’s what you have to do. :)
“This is going to become more and more common, until in several years the only books being printed on dead trees will be best sellers and Oprah’s Book Club picks. All other books will be available only as ebooks. More and more authors are discovering that they can make a better living self-publishing ebooks at $2 than they were making by having a publisher print dead-tree books and selling them for $9-$25. This is great news for authors and readers, but a disaster for publishers.”
I find this to be a prescient statement.
It almost mirrors the decline of the “music industry” as content distribution has changed from “physical delivery” (i.e., CD’s) to “digital delivery” (iPods, and the slew of other such devices, and the reality that the “content” to play on such devices can be distributed in many ways).
I’m not sure if the publishing industry will be impacted as much as the music business, because I sense that there will remain a demand for “physical books” by a small portion of those who consume such products. “Small”, perhaps, but “large enough” to sustain some vestige of publishing.
Your post above calls to mind the great scene in George Pal’s 1960 film “The Time Machine”, in which the time traveler asks to be shown the remaining books of the Elois civilization:
“Yes, we have books.”
Upon being taken to their “library”, he picks up a book, and it literally crumbles apart in his hands. He swipes his arm across a row of books on the shelf and they vanish in dust!
“Yes, we have books......”
I also own a kindle, with several hundred downloads .
My favorite reading on my kindle? OLD books-VERY old books. Long out of print folklore and mythology texts that no publisher thinks is worth reprinting*, but which have been put online as pdfs by google or Project Gutenberg, or have been digitalized as FREE DOWNLOADS!!!! by amazon for their kindle.
If I wanted to get these books as dead tree books, I would have to buy them from antiquarian book sellers, and I would be VERY lucky if they were available for under $100. A few are only available at close to one thousand dollars apiece.Some aren't even available from rare booksellers, or at least none that I've located. The cost of replacing these books as real books (which I would prefer, as I love the look and feel of a book in hand) would be prohibitive if not astronomical.
Having them as downloads is not as good as having them as books-but they were free or at very nominal cost, and it's certainly better than not having them to read at all-and some of these books were books I'd wanted to read for decades.
*Some are being reprinted by print on demand publishers like Kessinger, Forgotten Books, etc, but not enough are being reprinted this way . If I get a book on the kindle or as a PDF and I love it, I go ahead and buy it from a POD publisher, if it's one that's available.
My heart bleeds : I wound up going to a bookstore to browse, only to learn that I had wandered in on Pokemon Night. Well, at least the ear piercing banshee shrieks of the 12 and under he and she brats the happy cries of lovely children at play drowned out the Alternative Rock always played at high volume in the store (presumably so people trying to remember a title or author would give up and go away, letting the twentysomethings "working" there continue their socializing without being interrupted by pesky customers).
Thanks Swordmaker.
Used to think that.
Filled up my apartment with books. When we met, my wife was appalled. (Of course she was pleased, too, since we read much of the same stuff and I had a lot of stuff she hadn’t read yet...).
She got me a Kindle - I now have a 5 year back log on books to read - and most of ‘em were free!!!! I have not bought many books since then - just ones not available on Kindle, or that had illustrations that need to be seen on pages.
My wife then bought herself the next-generation Kindle (4G). She can not only use it to read, but update her Facebook account, send email and even text.
Sorry, but paper pages are on the way to the “specialty” market or print on demand market.
You read e-articles. You’ll read e-books in time.
I’m sure that we were separated at birth.
LOLOL!
[I know I shouldn’t laugh at your misery but it was *so* delightfully descriptive]
Mere words fall far short of conveying the horror of the reality , I assure you.
I can’t begin to imagine.
Potter fans are weird but Pokemon cultists are damaged.
[after-effects from all the strobe-induced seizures, I’m sure]
I agree. King Arthur is the best flour I have ever used.
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