Fun Stuff > ENJOY
The Amazon Kindle and other E-Book Readers
Vendetagainst:
@Yelley
You don't have to get them from Amazon, wikipedia lists over a dozen different sources. But you're right about PDFs, they're "experimental" and can upload with screwed up formatting. Still worth a try though, I would think.
öde:
I use my Eee 900 as a book, I just flip the display sideways.
0bsessions:
This is just another of those gadgets for folks with more money than sense. I can understand personal video players and music players and video gaming systems and all that, but this just seems idiotic.
You pay over $350 for the device itself and then another $2 for a digital rendition. That's simply not a price point that lends itself to any form of practicality or survivability of this format, especially as a proprietary one. Your average paperback book costs around $7. Going by that average, you'd have to buy a full 73 books on the thing before you actually started saving money over the cost of buying your books in paperback format. That's not accounting for used book stores and libraries.
That's the thing that really renders this completely fucking useless. Libraries. Why would someone need to get something like this when pretty much every city in America has a place you can go and borrow a book for free? An mp3 player is significantly smaller than this device and you can't exactly carry a day's worth of music around with you in any cheaper and more convenient manner. This device is no smaller than your average paperback and, thus, no more convenient. I'll find myself, in the course of a day, skipping around various albums on my iPod, but I've never found myself needing two different novels in any given day.
You're not saving money doing this, you're not making life much more convenient with this and you're probably going to strain the shit out of your eyes with this. This is an absolutely useless device. I could potentially envision myself using a similar device for comics, as that would balance out quick (Comics run between $3 and $4 each now and are a much quicker read than a novel), but for actual books? Idiotic.
Vendetagainst:
The first iPods cost four hundred dollars and were not that much bigger than a walkman. And while its surface area isn't any smaller than a regular book (why would you want it to be?) It's a hell of a lot thinner. Rather than carrying a five pound, three inch thick textbook, you can carry something that weighs just over half a pound and is less than half an inch thick. That's a huge difference, and I can only imagine how convenient it would be for students. On top of that, half the appeal is that it is not supposed to be like looking at a computer screen, it's supposed to read like a regular text and not have the same strain on your eyes.
Oh yeah, and it's backlit, texts can be marked and annotated, and you can subscribe to any number of blogs and magazines.
Katherine:
I would not like to use a Kindle for my main source of reading material simply because I like being able to lend out really good books to people so that they might read them and enjoy them as well.
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