My pal Joshua recently asked me my opinion on the new Kindle, as I’ve never really been a big fan of ebooks. While I’m still not a big fan of ebooks as a replacement for dead tree books, in thinking about them some more, I realized that I’d love to have my physical library mirrored as an ebook collection; it would be great if I could have the dead tree versions for reading and the digital version for full text search. It would certainly make research easier, that’s for sure. There would be no more “I remember reading this in one of my books on World War 2, but I don’t remember which one or where.” If I could remember a few key words, I could do a quick search and find it.
Of course, I wouldn’t want to buy each book twice at full price. In the future, I’d like to see some sort of sysem that allowed one to buy the ebook at a deeply discounted price when you purchased the hard copy; say, if I buy a $40 German grammar text, I can add the ebook version to my amazon.com cart at checkout for $10. I would assume the publishers would still be making money here; how much does it cost to print an ebook? I suppose preparation of the ebook has to be considered, but I’m guessing the bulk of publishing prep is now done on computers, so how much preparation work could there be?
Apparently, I’m not the only one wanting this. And indeed, if I could buy a hard copy of a book and get an ultra cheap digital version thrown into the basket… well, I might just hop onto the ebook bandwagon. Quick, someone buy me a Kindle!
The price of those things is ridiculous.
Other than the price, my only complaint is about the need for batteries… as for research I use post-its on any page I think may be remotely interesting in the future
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Yeah, they’re actually more than I paid for my netbook. I’ll take a tiny computer of a Kindle.
The price and what the Kindle is capable of is something that Joshua actually mentioned; he wrote about it on his LiveJournal, and you can read it here. Essentially, why pay more for less?
I’ve tried the post-it approach, and it didn’t work very well for me. I tended to accidentally pull the post-its out, or outright lose them. I know many swear by writing in the margins, but I can’t bring myself to do that.
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