Quote:
Originally Posted by stonetools
This is geek thinking. The average consumer will most likely just shrug her shoulders and buy the upgraded version of her current eBook reader, especially if its the same price or less than the current model.
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We can all spin out lots and lots of use cases, and in most of them, I admit that the average consumer will either never care, or never even know, that they've tied themselves to a specific vendor. Of the small percentage of people who read, probably a much, much smaller percentage re-read. People who lose access to this week's James Patterson number one bestseller are probably not going to care if they can't access it after their current e-reader breaks.
My own use case is reading voraciously to find books that I love enough to keep, and to want to re-read. Probably very atypical.
I freely confess that I am a geek, of literature and of computers. Attempts by vendors to lock me in trouble me not at all, because I ignore them. I just think it's a shame that most people get locked in without even knowing it. In the same impersonal (elitist) way that I feel badly for people who buy and read nothing but the series crap on the NYT Bestseller list, most of which bears the same relationship to quality writing as MacDonalds does to food.