I disagree about American anti intellectualism being enough to bring down the ebook reader as both Amazon and Rakuten Kobo are very international corporations who sell world wide. I wonder what percentage of Kindle reader sales are in the USA as Amazon does not release sales figures. So far as I am concerned there is no clear replacement product yet with the same set of characteristics including the ability to read in such a wide range of conditions with minimal eye strain and until there is I do not expect the ebook reader or e-ink display to vanish.
If anti intellectualism was as bad as you claim then liberal arts colleges and departments would be gone, along with libraries in many towns and cities.
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Originally Posted by bagpiper1
No doubt Capitalism played the major role in this but you cannot overlook possible underlying supporting cultural factors. Americans are anti-intellectual and anti-intellectual video culture has overtaken print culture since at least the advent of the T.V. That is the reason eReaders are a dwindling niche market (Kobo Aura One and the Oasis are good side affects of this trend , though, for us literati we get better ereaders but less choice). I bet more people have iPads and other tablets than eReaders and that is not because Tablets are equally good at reading but because most people want the tablets for other more anti-intellectual features while reading books is more of a less important afterthought function to them.
Now don't get me wrong I am not attacking Americans here. I am American, from New York, but America is anti-intellectual like the Roman empire rather than intellectual like the ancient Greeks. This is undeniable, for instance, see books like : The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby and Anti-intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter etc...
You know what ? Librarians, scholars and other people trying to keep their position in the capitalist system in relation to books or the gate keepers of knowledge may have been over ruled by Google if they bribed the court or politicians or whatnot to have the court rule on their side. Why did not capitalism function in this desired way ? As Steve Jobs said Amazon's Kindle e-book reader will fail because Americans simply don't read. So Google had no financial incentive here. So, uh , yeah, if the eReader market dwindles down and Kobo and Amazon eventually stop making eReaders all together who is to blame ? Americans. We are our own enemy.
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