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Originally Posted by rmeister0
Frankly, I will be surprised if they CAN sell them at nearly $500 a pop. That's a lot of money for a single purpose device.
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$500 is a good price for us early adopters (i.e. gadget freaks). But whether or not they sell them to the non-gadget people will depend grealy on the price of the eBooks.
For example, most of my O'Reilly books cost about $40 - on the average. Now, if the same eBook costs me only $20 (with no DRM, of course), then I save $20 per book.
So, $20 * 25 = $500. So I only need to have 25 eBooks to "break even". Looking at my library... counting... counting... yup. I have more than 25 books - way more than 25 books.
And that doesn't count the other benefits:
1. Much more shelf space! I just think of the benefits that the world would get if I decreased the mass of my apartment. 8-)
2. More portability. I only have so much room for so many books, so I have to pick and choose. With the iRex, I can pick and choose a much larger subset of books. It would be so cool to have all the Perl books on one device that I can easily take somewhere.
I think of how nice it would have been to have something like this when I was in college. $500 at the start of the 4 years of school, but all my books cost 50% less - plus no 200 lb backpack of books to haul to campus and back.