E-Readers (Kindle, Nook, using iPad for reading) yay or nay

my parents are very into their kindles and ipads

i'm not really feeling it

ipad is great for traveling, not really sure it was worth the purchase price for how much i use it tho, i subscribed to the new yorker and ive barely read it, when i got the print magazine i demolished every issue so idk

I'm pretty much an agnostic when it comes to reading formats (I'm still baffled by folks who leave email, twitter, chat, etc. up when they're reading - turn all that distracting shit off!) but at least electronic editions don't necessarily have a single point of failure (fire, flood, etc.)

Also

http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/images/Twilight-Zone-Time-Enough-At-Last-e1308174702152.png

In that Twilight Zone pic, most of the visible books appear to be old law books.

when the meteorite hits and the power grid is destroyed along with modern society, then you'll wish you'd eschewed these gadgets and kept a copy of 'the way things work' in a ziplock bag

The only thing that's srsly making me consider an e-reader is the previous 3 months I've been spending trying to read Infinite Jest on public transit. That shit is heavy to carry round and I can't comfortably hold & read it with one hand while standing on a packed bus. But I get most books from the library for free so I'd have to be doing a lot of commuting to justify the cost.

amazon kinder

In that Twilight Zone pic, most of the visible books appear to be old law books.

― Aimless, Wednesday, 21 December 2011 04:34 (4 hours ago) Permalink

what this teaches us is that howsoever the production and distribution mechanisms of the written word may change the logistics of set dressing will remain pretty much the same throughout

Ha

I use an iPad or other tablet for some of my reading

It's probably about half and half e-books on the iPad and paper books from the library. I love e-books for all the reasons stated above by others, although I really like paper books, too. I just like reading, so whatever allows me to read more makes me happy.

The iPad kind of blows as an e-reader on public transit so I have thought about getting a dedicated e-reader. I don't know, though. It feels kind of overly extravagant.

If I read on public transit I just use my phone. It's only 25 minutes, so not bad at all.

It drives me crazy when books aren't eAvailable. I've wanted to read Lore of Running for 2 years now but refuse to until it is available in ebook format.

i don't see the point of ipads either

is it really that they're just smaller than laptops? i kind of feel like i don't need a halfway house b/w the laptop and the phone

I use it as a laptop.

Also good for: reading books, watching movies/TV in bed or on planes, playing games, browsing the internet, light (and I mean light - if I have serious writing to do, I do it at the desktop computer) word processing, reading magazines, looking at recipes while you cook.

yeah - i think i'd rather have a keyboard i can type properly on (simply cannot deal with touchscreens) than a slightly lighter machine tbh

We also use the iPad to control our home theater pc. Although we can do that with phones as well. Basically the iPads are a constant couch companion. I cram mine in the cushions and just pull it out when ever I need to look something up.

You can get keyboard cases for it to give it a physical keyboard, but for better or worse, MS Word is where it's at for me and Pages, which is the wordprocessing app on the iPad, just doesn't cut it. But even when I had a laptop, I preferred to do most of my writing on a desktop machine - it's just easier on my body - so that wasn't a tough transition for me.

I know some people who write extensively using iPads, but I couldn't do it, and I am okay with touchscreens generally.

xp haha yeah they are good for settling arguments about the more famous roles of Star Trek guest stars.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Mises-Economics/2011/1219/E-books-get-pricey.-Will-customers-go-paperback

I think ebooks costing more is a good thing, BTW

Why?

people are gonna be more likely to pirate $15 books than $5 books

Well, it undervalues the amount of work going into writing a book, for one.

i almost always buy used books, which are cheaper than ebooks is one thing

Me too.

the amount of work that goes into a book has never had a strict correlation w/ how much money the author is going to make out of it

True, but I still think it undervalues the work.

Like if you worked on something 5+ years, would you really want to sell it for 99 cents?

you'd want to sell it for the price that will result in the most profit in the long-run, and $39493 probably wouldn't be that price even if you feel like that's the 'value', $10 might not even be that price

you'd want to sell it for the price that will result in the most profit in the long-run,

No, you'd want to sell it for the right price. No one is in the publishing business to make a profit!

marissa marchant to thread

ticked
I don't own an e-reader but I plan to get one/want one

I agree with most of the arguments for and against them. I'm hoping that getting one leads to more book reading and less internet reading.

lol @ "switch on a whole fucking machine" - like that's harder these days than "open a whole fucking book at the last page I was reading"

arent most ebook $10

there is not a set 'moral' value to prices or your work. in the long-term you prob don't want to create the culture of piracy that exists w/ movies and music, cause it's pretty easy to dl a book. so make things cheap and easy.

xp

The thing I love most about my Nook is that I can jump back and forth between reading on it and reading on the Nook application on my phone and the applications will sync to the last page I read if I am in a wi-fi location.

It's also great because I used to carry 3-4 books around with me at a time and now I don't have to because everything I'm reading is on the Nook.

Thinking about hacking it just because you can't really hack a book.

btw lex, the Nook has a sleep mode very similar to yr average smartphone, switching it on and unlocking it takes all of 2 seconds, about the same amount of time it takes to open a book assuming you're using a bookmark

you know he won't be swayed by anything resembling a fact, right?

dear lex,

nook is a feeling.

sincerely,

in the long-term you prob don't want to create the culture of piracy that exists w/ movies and music, cause it's pretty easy to dl a book. so make things cheap and easy.

eh, i think people are going to pirate stuff no matter how cheap you make things. songs are 99 cents on itunes & people still pirate music.

big reason book piracy hasnt taken off is only olds read

music piracy took off before itunes existed. I think it's gonna be hard to convince people to pay $15 for 2 megabytes of text in the future, but you might be able to convince people to buy lots of books for a few bucks each. or you could have some books-spotify thing.

the way people in this thread are pretending my objections are completely imaginary!

i basically feel with all of this that i am being sold shit i really, really don't need. sold for a prohibitively high price (still smh at being told this isn't the case)

People *are* paying 15 bucks for ebooks now though.

the way people in this thread are pretending my objections are completely imaginary!

some (not all) of your objections ARE completely imaginary

no youre completely imaginary

lol

"imaginary" isn't really the right word, more "arbitrary"; it's like you're afraid your valid concerns (you don't need it and you think it's too expensive) aren't enough so you keep going into things that aren't actually true (it's... difficult to turn on?)

yeah but ebooks still have a small marketshare, not very many people have tablets/readers, and people are still comparing the price to the price of the physical object. and as ice mentioned, mostly olds read and they don't really think of this like "hmm could I find a torrent site for this"

ultimately "$15" or whatever for a novel isn't some moral price that exists to give the author 'the right value' for his/her work. (almost) the only cost of production for an ebook is in the writing + eventually people are going to value the abstract data less than we value a physical object that also contained that data. in conclusion eventually I think we'll be buying most books for a few bucks.

xps

i have a kindle, and when i've used it (reading while carrying the baby, reading in subway, etc) it has been ridiculously easy + convenient. i haven't used it in awhile tho, and the reasons are:

a) a lot of the stuff i want/need to read are not yet available as ebooks
b) i tend to read more longform articles + online writing these days anyway and
c) i realized when i started using a kindle that i do a lot of page-flipping back and forth when i read, and e-readers are really terrible at, say, letting you flip thru the last 20 or so pages to refresh your memory on a particular detail. they're great if you know exactly what page it was on. less good if you need to scan a bunch of pages pretty quickly

page flipping hmm, interesting how new forms reveal these hidden habits