Comments on: “Think iTunes for books”

By: Debbie Lee

Debbie Lee — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 02:10:09 +0000

This was bought as a gift for my 80 year-old mother-in-law. She loves it! (My father-in-law loves not having to carry multiple books for her on their vacations.) Easy enough to use for a technophobe, and an extremely readable display. If I had to point to any shortcomings, it would be the keyboard. My mother-in-law has enough difficulty with her fingers and the tiny buttons that she generally uses a pencil-eraser to push the buttons. All-in-all, a wonderful product and a big win!

By: The Reincarnationist by M. J. Rose « Charlottesville Words

The Reincarnationist by M. J. Rose « Charlottesville Words — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 00:08:08 +0000

[...] with a rich-looking dustjacket. Is it shallow to make a point of that? I don’t think so. In discussions about e-books, I’m constantly hearing that people are attached to books as physical objects. The jacket, [...]

By: Catherine

Catherine — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 18:58:07 +0000

Yeah, and there’s lots of cd compilations put out by record companies, but now we can *all* join in!

By: marxsbeard

marxsbeard — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 16:25:15 +0000

[That idea of buying chapters, not whole books, is interesting. Imagine, like burning a mix cd, putting together a mix *book*.]

william burroughs did the cutnpaste mix book pretty well already.

By: Catherine

Catherine — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 20:24:21 +0000

That idea of buying chapters, not whole books, is interesting. Imagine, like burning a mix cd, putting together a mix *book*.

By: Jennifer

Jennifer — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 10:27:50 +0000

Call me a Luddite, but I like paper books, plain and simple. That said, if I traveled a lot, a real whole lot, an e-book would be a great way for me to pack lots of reading material without the weight of all those books.

By: Kempis

Kempis — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 16:26:20 +0000

I don’t want to have to go out and buy batteries to read a book.

The computer or laptop would be different in that I’m also using it for lots of other things, but I’m still not paying money for an electronic book.

By: marxsbeard

marxsbeard — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 16:23:30 +0000

ugh indeed. i still buy records (yes vinyl!) so can’t imagine myself with an ebook reader. and you know what this leads to, like itunes, with people buying chapters not full books. gravitys rainbow with the difficult bits taken out. 1984 without the miserable ending.

By: Elizabeth

Elizabeth — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 12:20:11 +0000

Great comments, Catherines!

I would have loved having a laptop/ebooks for college and graduate school. Soon a generation will arise that knows not the highlighter, the textbook sell-back, the writer’s cramp…

By: Another Catherine

Another Catherine — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 03:45:32 +0000

I recently switched my gigantic, heavy, paper organizer to a tiny Palm device that weighs approximately zero. I thought I’d give an e-book a try, to see if I could handle the small screen format, because then I could have a book always with me without having to lug it around. It’s weird at first, and the pagination is hilarious, with the average contemporary novel clocking in at around 2000 pages, but I found it very easy to get used to and am working on my 3rd e-book now. I use it as my lunchtime book and backup book — it’s never my “main” book — but I do enjoy reading that way and don’t even notice the “turning” of the pages anymore. If a character name shows up and I don’t remember him/her, I can just do a search — that alone is worth the price of admission. So my recommendation is to try it — you might get used to it more easily than you think, and you can still have your “real books” as well.