Dark Water Muse looks at competing technology from different eras:
The tech world is all a-buzz with reviews of eReaders and tablets capable of rendering eBooks, each of these device types purported to be candidates as the preferred host for future textual content to dethrone the lowly book as the natural media form readers turn to for reading textual content. Technical reviews focus solely on the merits of individual tablets and eReaders or line them up in comparative reviews. In DWM’s opinion these reviews completely miss the whole context of what is to be critiqued.
This tablet versus eReader battleground isn’t the real competitive landscape. Tablets and eReaders aren’t merely duking it out between themselves to win the hearts of readers. DWM views tablets as equivalent to eReaders when used to access published textual content such as books and magazines. Throughout the remainder of this piece DWM will refer to tablets, and other computer hardware which support eBook formats, and eReaders as simply eReaders.
As noted earlier, eReaders aren’t merely fighting amongst themselves for market share. The eReader, collectively, is fighting to displace the printed book. Read on as DWM explores exactly how that fight is going.
At the moment, I don’t really have any strong urge to purchase an ebook reader. I have a few dozen books on my iPhone, and it’s able to display the text acceptably well for casual reading (those few times I have to wait and for some reason don’t have a real book with me). My big concern with ebooks is less the reader and more the content: unlike a real book, you don’t own your copy of the content, and it can (and has) been remotely removed by the licensor in more than one case already. I have very great reservations about paying money to “buy” when it turns out that I’ve just paid a license fee that can be revoked at the licensor’s discretion without warning or compensation.
I’ve almost talked myself into buying an e-reader, mostly because you can get one for less than $150. Not just to get books from Amazon or wherever, but as a cheap “Project Gutenberg Terminal.”
Comment by cirby — May 7, 2011 @ 08:08
I have a Kindle from Amazon, and every book that I have bought has been saved on my computer and stripped of its DRM. There is a program called calibre that can be used to both keep track of your books as well as convert formats and, with some questionable plugins, strip DRM as well. Also, the free books from some publishers is nice and the afore mentioned Project Gutenberg means a lot of material available. There are other sources, such as Smashwords where people self publish their works too. The convenience of a transferable electronic format is, for me, too good to ignore.
mobileread.com is a great site with an excellent forum population, well worth a visit if you are on the fence about ereaders!
Comment by Dwayne — May 7, 2011 @ 12:15