Quote:
Originally Posted by hedro
If I started ranting that pbooks were useless because the books I wanted to read were not available, people would laugh at me and rightly so.
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Very appropriate answer, hedro.
shousa, as Harry tried to point out, your statement that the Kindle is tied to Amazon is inaccurate. In fact it is the reverse is what is true.
Amazon ebooks are tied to the Kindle.
On a further note, you have not defined what you mean by "average user". This could be considered the "average ebook reader" and if that is the definition then I think those of us on this forum represent the average user and therefore your argument fails.
Another definition might be the "average person". With this definition, your argument makes no sense because the average person usually doesn't read very much.
Finally if you mean the "average reader" you must keep in mind that "average" often does not provide adequate information about a distribution because it may be skewed or have a very large variance. That said, think back about the introduction of personal computers, if you are old enough. My first computer, in the early 1980's, was a RadioShack Color Computer. Any user today would laugh at it's capabilities (or what they would see as the lack of capabilities). I won't bore you with details of that computer (you can look up the information in history books) but let's just say its capalibities as a computer make the current ebook readers look fantastic and
very easy to use. As someone else stated, the ebook reader technology is in the kindergarten stage.
As to my own preferences - yes I am a gadget freak who really likes to read and hates being somewhere with a single book when I reach the end and yet have hours to spend before I can get something else to read. The ebook reader, holding several books, is an ideal answer for me.
You can see that my reading requirements may be very different to Harry's (I don't particularly enjoy reading the classics) but the ebook reader is the right solution for both of us. In 20 - 30 years, look again at your premise and see the state of reading electronically stored material.
