Quote:
Originally Posted by Marcy
A PDA may seem a small expenditure to you. However for many people it is a significant one -- they can get pbooks free from the library or for an extremely nominal fee at the used bookstore or the school book fairs. And the PDA or whatever technical doo-dad you chose to read your books on will have to be replaced every couple of years, since consumer electronics aren't really built to last.
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Many libraries are currently experimenting with or already introducing loanable e-book readers at the library, allowing those with limited incomes to borrow a reader and e-books to read, also free of charge.
My PDA may need to be replaced every so often... but as I pointed out, if you have your e-books on a separate storage medium, you can transfer them to another device with ease. These are not good reasons to denigrate the "technical doo-dads," they are minor points, easily addressed.
The realistic economics of printed books, however, are not so easily addressed. What do you propose to do about the diminishing print capacity of the world, and the need to leave trees standing to benefit the ecology, while the human population climbs closer to seven billion, making it harder and harder to get those books into the hands of those who want or need them?