Quote:
Originally Posted by Moejoe
... This is my concern with ereaders, the price of entry is far too costly for anyone who can barely scrape by as it is. ... Hundreds of years of campaigning for widespread literacy will be lost in a generation or two....
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Wow, this thread is becoming somewhat bizarre.
O.K., we get it, you live in a really tough neighborhood, where most can't afford iPod Touch, or an e-reader, or apparently a packet of cigarettes. I get it. I don't come from money, either, and I've lived in some pretty rough places during my life.
But you do realize, that most people in the world don't have many of the things those in your neighborhood have, such as solid roofs over their heads, indoor plumbing, free education, or taxpayers providing for those things.
In fact, $350 is indeed a "huge" amount for most people in Eastern Europe and Russia, where many work for significantly less, than what the "people in your neighborhood" get as unemployed. (And there is a good chance, that the "Polish Plumber," even if "poor" by UK standards, actually reads, and manages to do so without an e-reader.)
Then we can move to to the really, really poor countries of the world, some war-torn, with people for whom "your neighborhood" would be the dream of a lifetime.
But what does all this chest-beating, have to do with whether e-readers will begin replacing p-books, at some point, obviously first in the places where most of the participants in this forum live? Or with DRM? What's the point?