Even though electronic copies of every book ever exist, the threat of piracy has any publisher shit-scared to let them out into the wild.

And i don't blame them, you know that whatever DRM they put in, everything available will be on bittorrent within minutes of release.

Electronic books are a dead end for this reason alone. Audiobooks on the other hand, now those i like.

...it's limited in what it does, and it's butt ugly on top of it.

Where's my full 9x12-inch "live" area multi-use "reading" device in a thin, sleek, simple, elegant case?

Never mind the flying cars; where the hell's my friggin' _Newspad_?

I don't have a kindle, but I do have a Bookean Cybook, it's much easier to read on than a screen, either Desktop or a PDA/Phone screen.

The amount of reading I'm doing has gone up dramatically since buying it but...

I've looked at buying more modern books but balk at the price of the ebook versions which are exactly the same price as the paperback versions. That combined with not being able to find most of the titles I would actually be interested in reading means I'm never likely to be converted into a content buying customer.

Gutenberg has so far provided me with enough content to keep me happy, and although as mentioned in the article the text is very old (and it feels old, both in terms of the syntax and the ideas being expressed) I've found myself reading a wider range of genres to compensate.

ebook sales are being hurt by the publishers thinking that it's has always been selling content while the customer thinks it's been buying a physical item. Take away the physical item and the content is not worth as much to the customer (rightly or wrongly).

Dedicated ebook readers are also far to expensive for what people actually want to use them for.

I can buy a book in an airport shop, and drop it in the recycling before I leave my hotel to go home. Or I can have my Kindle fondled by security gorillas looking for the latest Al Quaeda manifesto, dropped in the bath, nicked from the hotel room, and I'll guarantee the batteries'll go flat 3 pages from the end of a thriller while I'm still waiting for my connection in Heathrow T5.

Another technology-led 'innovation' like mobile-phone TV...

But I've had my Kindle since Christmas and have purchased and read about 60 books so far. I love my Kindle. I hope it gains more widespread adoption because I'd hate to see the offerings go away.

As someone briefly touched on in a comment here, how on earth do you share an e-book?

With a standard book, there's absolutely no DRM. It's yours to do with as you wish (aside from plagarise it that is) - you can resell it or lend it to anyone you like.

You can swap books, buy second hand books for ridiculously cheap prices - none of this is possible with an e-book.

The more I think about it, the more it seems obvious that the market e-book readers will end up covering is mass media - magazines and newspapers.

I buy around 200+ books per year for the last 40+ years and I have NEVER EVER been tempted to buy a single e-book. I have been given a few (no names or methods mentioned) and if I like them, I went and bought the paper version for further enjoyment !!

E-books are like virtual sex !! When all is said and done, it's still not the real thing !! And it's a sad geek who thinks otherwise.

the thing about the sales declining over the past few weeks is that it is august and world+dog are going on holiday to sit on a beach in the sun by the sea

i'm sure everyone would rather risk a cheap paperback to the terrors of sand and salt water than an expensive brick of electronics

PLUS in bright sunny conditions, paperbacks are much easier to read through sunglasses than the Kindle screen

but the main problem is the cost i think - the Kindle is expensive and the cost of the books to load on it are not a great deal less than that of a paperback. for it to be a success then it'll be necessary to very heavily tax paperbacks to make e-books the obviously cheaper alternative

" Project Gutenberg is good, but eventually one is going to want something a little more contemporary. "

Hardly. Who would pay money to read any of the crap written in the last hundred years?

Well, I've seen the Kendle, and I think that's at least half of Amazon's problem. The unit is too large, heavy, and complicated to be a convenient "reader", but it doesn't do enough to be a small PC. It's stuck somewhere in-between a "book reader" and "PC", and does neither job adequately.

I've owned a Sony eReader for several years now, and LOVE it. Before getting it. I said I'd *never* get one of these because I simply like the look and feel of paper too much. However, my wife (a lit major, can you believe) purchased one, and I started "borrowing" it to take on business trips. It was heaven on airplanes because it's so small and light, and the screen is extremely nice and easy to read. I've had no problem getting "lost" in the material I'm reading - forgetting entirely that it's an electronic screen. The books are typically half the regular bookstore prices (although I wish the price was lower still). Plus, I tend to read longer works, which would be a very large heavy book (hard to carry, hold up to read, etc). On the eReader, I can have literally *hundreds* of books - even huge ones - all in a small light form factor. I can be reading several different books depending on my mood, and can have them all at my fingertips.

It even has a very nice leather cover - making it feel like a real book to your hands, and pleasant to carry around. Plus the battery seems to last forever (although it does seem to drain itself regardless of whether it's on or off, so it does need to be periodically charged - but certainly not daily like a cell phone)

As with all things, it isn't perfect, but it's pretty darn nice. And, keep in mind that even a paper-based book isn't perfect. (If it falls to the floor, you loose your place, they can be bulky and heavy, etc.) So, nothing is perfect.

So - as a former hater of even the *idea* of an "electronic reader", I can now say that there is one out there that's solid competition to old fashioned books. I don't think there's a real risk they will ever replace paper books, but for at least half of my reading, I now prefer the eReader.

The key question: how long will it take for enough people to shell out the $$$ for one of these to really spark the market. In my mind, the Kindle did more harm than good, and likely poisoned the thinking of a bit part of the potential market who are now likely turned off the idea.

Dave L.

Kindle costs a ridiculous $349 which is overpriced even if you're looking at the hardware in it. It is also tethered to Amazon's own service, has extremely poor support for open file formats, and it is boot ugly.

Who the hell is buying the thing?

Even if ebooks are 5 cheaper, that means you must have bought 70 books through Amazon to pay for the reader. And of course you can't sell your books afterwards and might not even be able to access them if Amazon decides to can the service, or your machine goes kaput. The Sony Reader is a little better since it doesn't look ugly and has wider format support but its still expensive and tethered to a single store.

The ebook industry should serve as a warning to other forms of digital downloads. It demonstrates what happens when downloads devolve into dozens of competing, incompatible formats, proprietary devices and publishers, all randomly gathered into warring factions with a few 500Lb gorillas smashing the little guys from time to time. The entire ebook market is a wasteland which has resulted in disinterest and confusion from the consumer. The funny part is that you are far more likely to find the book you are after from a pirate site and it will be scanned and formatted in a nice open format too.

If ebooks are ever to take off it will require the adoption of a single common format, that all publishers and device manufacturers can implement. It shouldn't even use DRM, but rather passive watermarking. Sales will surge and competition will mean lower prices. Yes there will be piracy but so what? There is already but at least legitimate sales will go through the roof to offset the losses. Right now, everyone is getting the shaft because everyone is too greedy to compromise. The same thing will happen to downloadable videos in time if they don't get a clue.

You need to fork out $400 and then you save about $1 a book!

As far as book clubs go Amazon-Kindle sounds like a bit of a swindle

Me, I've been fine with using my old Tungsten E2 as a eBook reader. The only bother is converting things into a Palm-readable format, but that takes, what, 5 seconds? It helps that I have no qualms about downloading a book of questionable legality if I already OWN the bloody book in meatspace.

Arguments could also be made for downloading/sharing free eBooks much like you would get free books from a library, but there's the issue of how Late fees would be handled...

While there is only a 10 to 20 percent price reduction for an ebook version nobody is going to be buying them. Currently ebooks have zero resale value and you can't even give them away because of DRM.

When ebooks are only 10 to 20% of the cost of physical books, the market will take off.

BTW, don't expect the old book industry to promote ebooks. Amazon was forced to develop its own hardware and market place for ebooks.

Its the wrong device at the wrong cost that does the wrong things. Its too focussed on DRM and not focussed enough on the user.

When you buy a physical book you have something you can read anywhere ("batteries not needed") and you can lend to someone else.

The price is silly as well. Readers should be cheap like the audiobook players that we have at our library -- the player is now so cheap that the book is the player, its a single unit like a small book with buttons on it (you provide your own headphones).

My Kindle came as a gift as I was not disposed to plunk down $370 USD for the privilege of buying books exclusively from Amazon. But I have one now and it is largely filled with free or low cost ebooks. Best Sellers are a bargain at about $10.00 and I have two of those. I do not regard the Kindle as a replacement for books but as a way to extend reading content into other parts of my life. When I travel I dine alone and the Kindle is great. As I decamp from Wyoming to Florida for the cold season, I will have many references and old friends at hand. Some older out of print books are only available as ebooks and I am glad to have them at hand..

The device in this first issue has some shortcomings. Amazon could take a lesson from iTunes. In Wyoming there is no Sprint network-thus no connectivity nor web surfing. That will change in Florida. Meantime, my laptop is a more cumbersome way to add ebooks to the Kindle.There are some tricks to it. There are a number of aspects of the Kindle that are not intuitive.Mostly I'm really annoyed that the books I purchased from Mobipocket- an Amazon company, can NOT be read on the Kindle. That investment must rely on my computer and Motorola Q telephone. Mobi ebooks also has a free reader that can read ebook purchases on one's laptop. Not so for the Kindle. If you buy a Kindle book it is a Kindle forever.

They attempted to emulate the simplicity of the iPod with a rather convoluted menu system. The optional memory card must be accessed separately to appear in the table of contents. The standard 256 MB memory seems paltry in view of the the low cost of memory, though it must be noted that ebook files are fairly small files.

Battery life is problematic in any portable e-reader. I left the Internet switched on overnight and went to proudly demo the Kindle the next day only to find it dead. The Motorola Q similarly is limited in time. I don't take kindly to tethering. A common complaint on Amazon is that the supplied rechargeable proprietary battery dies in about three months. A user replaceable spare, nonethelss prorietary, costs $20.00. A definite weakness.

The screen is not an issue for me. It is fine and ingenious. I note they are selling booklights for the Kindle now so the screen may an issuue for some.

I would buy one at a price point of about $200.00.Given the lock Amazon has on the content and the lower cost of content, that would be about right. I believe the lack of interoperabilty among various ebook formats is going to be an extreme hurdle for the ebook industry. All content producers are going to suffer unless they adopt a single standard.

The game boy et al model seems to be hopeful for me.

Simply have a pair of "sockets" on the device and use microsd sized cards, you could do a complete works card, or a single book.

Then you can share the cards.

Of course you need a drawer in the device then as well...

The Sony PRS-505 is lighter, easier to use, takes memory cards and so on. It supports plenty of formats other than its propriatory ones, as well. It's trivial to read any of my Baen (non-DRM'ed) ebooks on there, for example.

I, for one, have no interest in Kindle. It sounds like a sillly cliche but there is no substitute that even comes close to curling up in a chair and turning the pages of a book, or a magazine, or even the newspaper...compared to reading any or all of the above online.

90% of new technology is interesting and useful but, again speaking for me anyway, this is a part of the 10% that is not.

Regarding th4e Kindle. I haven't figured out a good place to put the boogers.

I'm getting a bit confused here. Maybe it's just me, but the quality of the writing is kind of important to my own personal reading experience. Are some of your correspondents really saying that they'd rather read complete trash from a printed hardback than a brilliant novel on an Ebook? Does the magical feeling that you get when you prise open the beautiful velum of your latest Jeffrey Archer truly compensate for the fact that you're reading badly written drivel?

I've just read my first eBook in years, and despite the small screen, I've throughly enjoyed it, for the simple reason that it contains terrific prose and wonderfully inventive ideas. I'd have enjoyed this book on any format that I read it on, because it was written by one of my favourite writers.

The reasons that eBooks haven't taken off are that the devices are too expensive and the books cost the same as the equivalent paperbacks or even hardbacks. Why pay fifteen or twenty quid for the electronic version of a book that you can get in hardback for less than a tenner from Amazon? It's clearly nuts.

Fortunately there's plenty of free and completely legal content out there from places like Project Gutenburg and Feedbooks. If you just wanted to read out of copyright classics, you could easily save money by buying a Sony ebook and downloading your books from Gutenburg.

I've looked at the Kindle, but as others said, I can't stomach the price, only to be locked to one DRM locked standard.

I ended up buying a Sony PRS-500, and then later on a PRS-505.

The only gripes I had with the 500 were how slow it could be when accessing a large memory stick or SD card, and that the battery life seemed to be getting short.

That being said, mine had been a display model before I bought it, so I suspect that the Lithium Ion pack had a shortened life due to the constant charging at 99% capacity.

The PRS-505 that I currently use is a bit faster, charges off of USB (unlike the 500, which uses a PSP power cord), and as also noted, reads a great number of book formats. I don't think I've loaded any DRM'd books on mine, and only recently started to use the BBeB formatted books on it, just due to having found that Baen now offers them along with the other 5 or 6 formats that they offer their books in.

For me, I love the idea. Having dead time at work, waiting for things to break, it's a life saver to have something to read. Someone above already mentioned the ability to have multiple books, so that when your mood changes, or you just get fed up with one style of writing, you can change what you are reading. Having it all in a small enough package to slip it into a pocket and get on with your life when you need to is nice as well.

As much as I like my hard copy books, I hate moving the boxes of them when I move, so this is another consideration I've been looking at. Add to that that I read Sci-Fi, and Baen publishes from free to ~$7 ($15 if you want the book as it's going back and forth between the author and the editor, before publishing), and the pricing works out for me.

I had a shop around for an eBook reader a while back and found the Kindle to be much like the iPod - popularised to the fore by a big company, but actually one of the poorer devices out there.

But, as has been mentioned, the problem is the greed of the publishers, who think it's acceptable to price an eBook at the same or nearly the same price as a physical copy. (By the way, the same goes for online music distributors - there's a reason I buy all my CDs second hand and then rip from there.) No-one is going to buy an eBook when the real deal is the same price or even cheaper. To hell with that.

They just aren't big with the mainstream publishers as yet. My wife is an author and many of the little publishing outfits publish in e-book format as an option. Oftentimes the author refuses this publishing method as well as they are afraid it cheapens the work or diminishes their copyright.

Oh well. They can't all be married to handsome geniuses can they?

I read ebooks on a used tablet PC that I got for $100. And it does a whole lot more that ebooks.

But I have yet to hear the environmental extremists jump on the ebook bandwagon. Think of all the trees that would be saved if we only transferred content rather than paper.

I am still looking for the ebook retailer who guarantees their price will be lower that any paper book seller. Certainly the costs are lower so why do the ebook retailers demand a premium price.

As for Kindle, no thanks. I do my best to avoid proprietary solutions like everything Apple

is that if you want to tell me what I can do with what I bought, don't sell it to me.

Worse, with a DRM'd book reader, don't get me to pay through the nose and then tell me I cand do with it as I can with a book (or hell, even a bookshelf).

Don't sell your stuff if you don't like the conditions. After all, if your work is so valuable, keep that value for yourself.

Deal?

It isn't a kindle, but I've got an idea why even the Kindle isn't causing the mass e-book sales that were expected. The prices for ebooks are HIGH. Usually only a small amount less than a physical copy of the book. It's plenty easy around here to get a bunch of books at far cheaper prices by going to "Half-Price Books" or something similar. If they would charge a reasonable rate for books (like they do at Baen Books) they would sell a LOT more books. I've bought a bunch from Baen, simply because they are cheap enough that I can buy 6 or 7 for each one I end up really liking. Try that with books that are $7us each and you'll end up in the poor house!

I'd snap an e-paper device up in a nanosecond if they provided one that could do what I wanted it to do.

Namely: allow me to write and organize notes (see Newton writing recognition - surely the tech has improved since?), allow me to get electronic copies of books that I OWN (not with DRM that is dependent on servers that may or may not shut down at any time), allow me to exchange publications in formats of my choosing, not charge me to convert documents, and generally not try to treat me as a walking wallet that I'm supposed to allow them to syphon whenever they want.

So far the iRex illiad is leading the pack for me, but it still has certain limitations that I find troublesome. Still, it seems to be the best of the bunch.