[Moejoe]

Originally Posted by Sonist

Dude, what's up with this? Did you short Amazon or something?

I wanted to check your "nobody reads, the culture has changed" statement, so I did a quick search (electronic, not paper.) Came up with this survey, titled "Fiction Reading Increases for Adults," comparing American reading habits since '82:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/12/books/12reading.html

It appears that readership fluctuates. Now take population expansion into consideration, and you'll likely end-up with net gain of readers.

If you don't like your e-reader, fine. Most users apparently like theirs. Sales are increasing rapidly enough, to merit notice, and to send agents and publishers on the war-path over e-rights.

You keep making statements about what YOU need (cheap, color, movies, annotations, etc..) Frankly, nobody really cares. What matters is that there is demand, and there appears to be a market trend toward e-readers. A lot of hardware seems to be coming out soon, some from major players. The sales projections are impressive. Niche or not, it seems to be coming. And this is all that matters to the world at large.

The report you linked to counts 'online reading' as part of the overall statistics and states (from the article)

The proportion of adults reading some kind of so-called literary work — just over half — is still not as high as it was in 1982 or 1992, and the proportion of adults reading poetry and drama continued to decline.

and goes on further to state that

In each survey since 1982 the data did not differentiate between those who read several books a month and those who read only one poem. Nor did the surveys distinguish between those who read the complete works of Proust or Dickens and those who read one Nora Roberts novel or a single piece of fan fiction on the Internet.

I'm in no way surprised that reading has increased, if you take into account 'online' reading as part of the statistics, but it in no way gives merit to your persistance of view that the e-reader is anything but a niche product, or that overall reading has increased to a point where the e-reader becomes a must-have product as the Mp3 player has become in modern society. And I go back to the article, which is a mixed bag at best and proves very little, apart from the fact that nobody really knows and quote the Michigan Professor -

The rise could just as easily be attributed to changes in health care or a need for escape in difficult economic times, she said.

How about we stop using the word 'niche' because it seems to offend you so much (as your pompous disregard of money offends me and mine) and we use something, let's say, more honest. Let's say that the e-reader has a 'limited market' or maybe even a 'specialised market'.

What nobody has even mentioned, but I think has to be addressed, is the issue of digital segragation that these e-readers might create. If you're completely correct in your assumptions then it means only those who can afford the devices will have access to digital books. This cuts a vast swathe of the population, and those who might benefit the most, out of the game. Whereas a lending library gave access to all, the barrier of owning an expensive device, cuts out those who can't afford it. Reading becomes the privilidge of the rich once again, and the poor, as usual get it in the knackers. Of course, this assumes that the lending library goes 'full' digital and doesn't stay with paper for a long time to come. But even if it does not, there's a vast part of the population that won't have access to what could be a defining technology that increases literacy because of a cash barrier.