Quote:
Originally Posted by pilotbob
That said, in the US i would always recommend the Kindle first... content, content, content.
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Bob, you say it and every Kindle owner seems to say it (as well as some non-Kindle owners) as if it has any real meaning: "content, content, content."
I'm not disputing raw numbers -- Amazon currently has nearly 4 times the numbers of something available for the Kindle (I say "something" because not all of it is books and some are redundant). But that is meaningless. If Amazon or Sony or Fictionwise had 1 gazillion more books available than any of its competitors but not the 1 book I want, what good is it?
Rather than "content, content, content" the advice should be for a person to check each of the stores and discover which has a selection that the individual is interested in reading. For example, I have absolutely no interest in Romance, Horror, Short Stories (omnibuses thereof), or Poetry categories, so even if Amazon offers 100 times the numbers that Sony offers in those categories, it is meaningless to me and the Kindle could turn out to be a poor choice for me because of the number distortion. OTOH, if I mainly read Romance category books, Amazon and the Kindle might be a better choice than the Sony.
The other problem with the content mantra is that it focuses on a single store -- what Amazon offers for its Kindle in comparison, say, to what Sony offers for its Reader. But a better and more realistic comparison if raw numbers are all that count, is to count and compare all ebooks available in all formats that the Kindle can read natively versus those available in all formats that another device can read. I suspect -- but admit that I do not know -- that the numbers gap would be significantly smaller.
And one final problem with the content mantra is that it ignores future trends. For example, we know that Hachette and Penguin plan to release all their ebooks in the ePub format -- not the Kindle or Sony format. Granted Amazon and Sony will be able to convert to their proprietary formats (assuming they have agreements to do so), but if ePub is the future trend and if the idea is to buy a reading device today and keep it for a while, then perhaps a device that can read ePub is a smarter move.
Anyway, raw numbers matter little; the real content question is "Is what I want to read available for the device I want to read it on."
My 2 cents towards the $64 question.