Quote:
Originally Posted by M.H.
I don't believe the comparison with iPods is valid anyway. Vinyl records, cassette tapes and CDs have always required additional hardware in order to play back the recording so needing an iPod for MP3s was seen as acceptable. It has always been necessary to spend money on this hardware. With paper books, however, you buy the reading hardware with the content and you get get new hardware every time you buy a paper book. For ebooks the hardware is an additional cost that wasn't required before and much higher than it is for the paper book. Anybody who only reads occasionally is going to balk at spending £200+ on an ebook reader. You need to either read a lot or have a need to carry several books at once before it becomes attractive or, what I think is the real barrier, the price has to come down.
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I agree and I do believe, as with most things techie, the price will drop and the screen technology will improve to the point it's usable for a wider range of content and applications. As this happens, the market for these devices will broaden beyond us book-lovers.
Like most of us here, I do read a lot and I've found quite a few ways in which my reading device saves me money even though that wasn't why I bought it. One of the basic savings is with storage. People may not need extra hardware to read a book but if you want to keep them, you need to store them. My Kindle is pretty cheap as bookshelves go, doesn't take up much space and never needs dusting. As with digital audio players, the portability is a great advantage, the one people usually think of first, but clearing out the clutter from my home has been another huge benefit from both these technologies.