Quote:
Originally Posted by ahi
Very good point. This is perhaps one of the best reasons that liseuses will eventually standardize both display sizes and feature sets. Liseuses, for the average person, will never be like cell phones... and the person whose overpriced and underperforming device fails on them after 2 years will go back to buying $0.99 - $19.99 paper books every now and then, instead of shelling out another $200 - $300+ for the most limited portable computer they ever owned.
- Ahi
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Thanks for that...it has been on my mind for quite a while. I was sorely disappointed in my Nokia N800 given Nokia stopped officially supporting it just a year after I bought it. That is one of the "punishments" in today's marketplace if one is unwilling to be an "early adopter" aka UNCOMPENSATED beta-tester. It also seems today's early adopters are what we called beta testers 10-20yrs ago. Not many pieces of new electronic gear come off the line ready for prime time these days. Often taking at least a couple generations to become stable and dependable and finally reach the point of being useful. So that means if one buys into a system which is new, count on spending 2-3x more than the original price over then next 3-5yrs in order to simply keep your data and now locked-in workflow in place. It requires a lot of time and effort to adapt to a system then integrate that system into your daily workflow or even recreational use flow.
Sony is pretty well know for making abandonware devices. But to be fair so are many other companies. Canon for example really hosed photographers when the went completely digital in the SLR market by using a completely new lens mount rendering 10's of thousands of dollars in lenses people owned useless. Pentax OTH went the other way and retained their K-mount and this compatibility with lenses as far back as 40ish years old. Interestingly enough we are finally seeing a resurgence of the Pentax brand because of this and, now that Hoya owns them, a more solid road-map.
Book readers are a special breed of device, at least in my eyes. They are replacing a very reliable and long lived platform, the printed book/word. The infrastructure is very efficient and a book will last your entire lifetime if properly, or heck, even if improperly cared for. We buy books fully expecting them to live forever, at least as far as it will matter to us. I know I don't buy a book expecting it to be unreadable in a year or two or even twenty.
And to be honest, I am not certain there is a net environmental gain in the production of reader devices. People often overlook the true "cost" of building these synthetic devices. The toxic chemicals used are awful with toxicity lifespans in terms of centuries in many instances. And if the toxic byproducts are properly destroyed/detox'd there is energy involved which usually exceeds the energy to produce the devices/components themselves.
Books, however can be produced with a fairly well known and managed environmental footprint. Sure there are also toxic or environmentally damaging by products from production of paper and those too need to be dealt with properly.
There are also reasons these devices are made in certain parts of the world...the laws defining toxic waste as well as it's proper management are thin as the rice paper they are printed on. Ironically there are organic options to improve both footprints, one is from the same source but due to the money invested in the current timber/paper and plastics/silicon industries we will never see a return to this far more efficient starting material.
I really look forward to what happens in the reader industry. Who will be the first to declare their device as a "Green" device, notice none currently really promote on that basis. I find the omission of what would be a HUGE marketing tool today, very intriguing. My guess is books are still greener than readers no matter how one looks at them. Then factor in the obvious desire of a limited device lifespan and, well, it puts these devices in an even darker light.
I think it would be even better if a device maker would sell a device where if one really wants to move to a newer level of features of the current generation, why not let people send in their old device and swap out the guts? At least it would decrease the number of cases made and ultimately discarded over the next decade.
Kinda weird to consider it all...people are flocking to the devices but I wonder how many think about or even give a crap what they are really buying into and the overall effect these devices have on people where they are made and eventually the world. I know it all sounds a bit trite, still it is all fact that any and all of these devices create waste products which never existed when we simply read books. And for the nit pickers out there, you net nannies know who you are, I and others who actually wonder about these things, we do see the irony of using computers to write this sort of comment...but thing of it this way, computers provide a way to communicate that did not exist previously and the advent of the internet made that even better. Plus I personally have never retired a PC younger than a decade...in fact I have several decade+ yrs old systems still being used in a variety of dedicated ways on my networks.
My suggestion for book folks..."magpie" all the books you can NOW while they can be had in a format your device supports...then in 5yrs when there is a shift on supported formats you will be just-fine-thank-you-very-much because you squirreled away ten lifetimes worth of books.
