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Originally Posted by stonetools
If you've ever rented a movie from iTunes or watched a movie from the Netflix streaming service, or listened to streaming music from Pandora or Spotify, you'll find that these consumer experiences are quite enjoyable and very convenient.
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Of course, all that content is in good digital condition to start with. The number of returns for "this digital recording is full of skips and mispronounced words" are really very low.
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Generally, when people raise objections to this idea, they bring up boundary situations like "Suppose I have to go hiking in the wilderness or be on safari in deepest Africa, then how will I get to stream my ebooks."
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Because books, unlike music & movies, are common things to bring on vacation to low-tech settings. "I want it to work on a boat five miles from shore" is a very reasonable request for literary content; music evolved as a more social phenomenon, and it's only recently that it's been divorced from bulky machinery or a requirement to find actual *people* to make the music. Books, OTOH, have been available as a solitary, away-from-everyone pursuit for five hundred years.
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Of course, 90 per cent of the time, people do their reading at home, where wifi is handy.
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I read a substantial portion every day on the train on the way to work, including through the transbay tunnel. No wifi, and 3g is sporadic. While I'm not a potential customer for this (no wifi on my ereaders, and I don't do Amazon ebooks), I see plenty of iPads, iPhones and Kindles on my trips to and from work; cloud-only ebooks won't work for them.