> > What really does stand a chance of stopping electronic books is the > specter of DRM that Bill Robb and Adam Maas have pointed out. > Publishers' greed, in other words. > > People have to be able to back up electronic books somehow, > so that they > can be confident that if they drop, break or otherwise incapacitate > their reading device, they haven't lost the hundreds of books thay > bought to store on it. > > The real Achilles Heel of the whole enterprise isn't technological it > is, as usual human. >
Of course it's human - that's who reads books - but the Achilles heel is that they are trying to create a market which doesn't exist. The whole enterprise is about greed. It has nothing to do with what the customer wants, and all to do with the producers trying to reduce their costs and push this nonsense onto people. They will try to convince people that there is a need for these things where no need exists - that's why the world has admen, who can make themselves believe anything without evidence. Throughout this discussion I have asked people to point out the benefits of these devices to readers, but nobody has been able to do so. The people trying to push this stuff simply do not understand the psychology of reading. Whatever the supposed benefits are for readers I'll bet you my entire collection of Spinoza 1st editions that I can outweigh them with the disadvantages, and with the advantages of traditional books. My guess is that the gadget-lovers who've bought these things will be enthusiastic about them for a few weeks, buy a few e-books, then move on to the next gadget, leaving their Kindles to gather dust under their bed, next to the bread-making machine and the exercise bike and last year's useless piece of shit from Sony. And lest you think I'm a complete Luddite, I should point out that I do have an e-book reader. On my mobile phone / PDA I have a copy of some software called Mobi Pocket, and I have 3 ebooks - an English dicitionary and 2 volumes of a French-English dictionary, because it's convenient to have them with me when I'm travelling. I also have the printed versions of each volume. Bob -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
