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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I wouldn't be laughing. I regularly go out looking for major publisher's novels to buy, only to discover that it's already been pulled off of my bookstore's shelves after being there for a few months to a year.
With a shrinking number of used bookstores out there to find
slightly older titles, and even Amazon not being able to supply some books after their first paperback run, I see the value in e-books making those books available. Books no longer have to vanish just because they are not "brand new" anymore.
Now, as far as the e-book readers (and I believe we are limiting this discussion to "dedicated" readers, and not multi-use devices like PDAs), if you can settle on a reader that satisfies your need for
operability, I think you can find most novels out there in a format that you can convert to the reader's format, with just a little work. It's obviously not an optimum solution, many people would consider it too much trouble.
In the future, possibly every e-book will be released in a universal format that can be ported onto your reader automatically (like having your Sony Reader automatically convert an ePub file to LRF). For those who have trouble finding the book they want in the right format (or not wanting to bother to convert), they might have to wait for that next step.