Quote:
Originally Posted by meeera
Could be the non-techies I know are a bit more techie than the non-techies you know? Ebooks are words with a bit of formatting, they know that much, and words-with-a-bit-of-formatting should be relatively easy to transfer from one platform to another. DRM has been deliberately layered on top to make them non-interoperable. Apps and games, on the other hand, obviously won't 'naturally' be able to be run on a variety of platforms unless a lot of effort has been put in to port them.
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How deep among the general has ebook tech penetrated the antipodes? 5%, 10%, 20%?
In the US/UK (25-30%) there are a lot of mainstream readers; people who got into ebooks via the walled gardens, especially kindle, and thus see ebooks as more inline with iPhones, iTunes, and console gaming where the content is specifically tied to the consumption platform.
Other countries (cough*continental europe*cough) where ebooks have not yet hit the mainstream (and never will if the entrenched pbook establishment maintains their influence in local givernment) the typical reader is a techie or ebook enthusiast. Often a veteran of the pre-Kindle era.
Very different expectations between veterans of the PDA era and the Kindle core demographic. The latter cares primarily about getting books cheap and reading books. The plumbing is of less interest to them than the torque curve of their car's engine.
To them ebooks are a serendipitous form of Clarke tech.