Quote:
Originally Posted by delphidb96
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You have to understand that we're building NAEB from the resources of five, that's right *FIVE*, average people who have average lives and average incomes.
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While that's technically true, it doesn't tell the whole story. The original idea was to form a co-op to do a group purchase (well, the ORIGINAL original idea grew out of a baen-bar forum discussion on e-book readers and was for a co-op to develop an independent ebook device - but it turned out later that the cybook pretty much fulfilled all the requirements for the first generation version for less money than we could possibly hope for and it was therefore a better idea to just buy them). The five people Derek mentions formed the governing board of the co-op. The hitch with that was once the board was formed, the next step of member buy-in never materialized. NOT because no one was interested (plenty of people asked about it and offered to buy in) but apparently because of issues with money management prior to creation of the corporate entity (who receives the funds, how do we pay for the commercial bank accounts for a company that may or may not get off the ground, what happens to the money if it turns out that the cybook isn't the greatest thing since sliced e-ink, etc). Plenty of people like yours truly would love to buy into the NAEB co-op to support this project.
All that aside, and to reiterate, the NAEB reader really is a cybook - NAEB is acting as a retail outlet through a buying-group rather than as a competitor since individual retail sales directly from bookeen aren't in the works yet.