Asus confirms e-book reader trio Asus has clarified plans for an e-book reader rollout, telling Register Hardware that it will launch three models in the UK this year. Asus_DR950_01 The DR-950: Asus' first and largest e-book viewer Details of a 5.7in colour-capable Asus e-book reader – the DR-570 – appeared earlier today. However, Asus has since told us …
Let's hope Asus chooses to seriously undercut the competition to get market share. Hopefully this will drive the price of this type of device down.
Then all we need is the publishers to stop being greedy and eBooks might finally take off. This is likely to be the huge fly in the ointment. It doesn't matter how many manufacturers start producing readers, if the eBooks themselves remain at their current prices then people just won't go there.
Usenet and BT sites are already rife with ebooks, and because of the small size for each book it would only take a couple of seconds to download the latest best seller. If the publishers don't wake up and move with the times quickly they will soon find that their future business has already been destroyed by the freetards.
No, they should make the e-books readily available at a reasonable price, and then the punters will actually -buy- them. DRM certainly hasn't stopped the books being wildly available as you observe. While I hate the Kindle and everything it stands for, the reasonable price of Amazon ebooks is what has gotten this thing off the ground in the past year.
Also, with your grizzling about music downloads, aren't there statistics that show music purchases on the the rise, if you include MP3 purchases? The only thing that's "killed" record companies (and how many have gone bust lately, hm?) is their refusal to acknowledge that the CD is no longer king. Simple.
My mother-in-law has just been lucky enough to have been gifted a Sony ereader Touch, which I have set up for her. I'm impressed by the concept of these devices, and will buy one.
I can't though, the price is absolutely ridiculous for them. I'd pay £100 for a touch screen model; that's when I'll jump in. I've already got a netbook and a phone, thanks.
I really would like to use an E-book reader to save having to carry many books with me, when I can just use the pdf versions of those books.
I guess, I could also convert lecture notes into PDFs as well and carry them with me. The thing that really annoys me is the cost. They do much less than what netbooks do, yet are about the same cost as the first generation of netbooks.
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