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The Amazon Kindle and other E-Book Readers
Alex C:
Can we rename this thread "In which DarkFlame admits to having a squalor fetish"?
Alex C:
Yeah, see, my mild enthusiasm for gadgets cancels out my mild enthusiasm for the aesthetics of books. It comes down to a simple matter of practicality for me in the end. For now, the costs and the limitations sound too intimidating to me, just like with most electronics; I'm not a big early adopter. But the digital distribution angle is potentially a huge selling point for me.
Joseph:
See, I can find just about any book I want, with a bit of hunting, in used bookstores for between 5 and 10 dollars, never mind all the $1 bargain bin finds. On average downloading the books to the Kindle would be more expensive.
Upon a bit of reflection, I can see some value though, as far as books which have gone out of print. I've been hunting for a lot of old Nabokov and E.E. Cummings books for ages now, with no luck outside of my school library, and would love to have some personal copy of the text, and though I would rather the book, at this point I'd settle for something digital. Having said that, I think the machine which Tom linked to earlier would be a much better solution to the problem.
For The Espresso Machine though, I am a bit confused about how books would be provided in "just about any language" as the Publishers Weekly article claims. Would they not still need translators? I know there are a number of books which I have been interested in reading which aren't available in English, and I fail to see how this machine would solve that.
0bsessions:
Jesus, Norway. Anyway, your typical paperback off the shelf in America can cost $7 or less in a lot of instances. Shit, the larger than average paperback version of the Subtle Knife I'm reading is priced at $8. The most I've ever paid for a paperback was $1d for the Zombie Survival Guide.
Shit, even hardcovers aren't all that expensive here. I paid something like $21 on release night for the last Harry Potter book in hardcover and World War Z was under $20 at Barnes and Noble.
Books, they be cheap.
TimA:
One of the other advantages of e-readers in general is that it pretty much cancels out any issues with distribution and shelf space in bookstores. This is obviously more of an issue with new books, and is a big concern for new writers. If your debut novel doesn't do that well at the local Borders, they're just not going to order your next novel.
Anyway. Not sure that's relevant to the discussion. It'll be a while before I make the switch to electronic, but god bless the early adopters and the innovators.
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