Amazon's Kindle

[rov1200]

What are the advantages and disadvantages of this book reader?

[Prudie]

You don't have to fill it modeller, don't quite get your point, if you had a bookcase that held 3500 books it would cost way more than that to fill it.

[modeller]

That's true prudie it just seemed a rather poor selling point . I mean how many books would the average user want to store ? A hundred maybe . I could see the point if it meant I could browse through 3500 books before actually buying , like going into a library, but unless I'm mistaken that isn't possible. I often take 10 books from a library and end up with reading maybe 4 .
That would be an expensive exercise using an ebook.

[Prudie]

Actually I also see your point - I think it's a selling point to those swayed by technology and wizardry. My partner has an ipod that has so many songs on it that apparently he would have to listen to it for 19 days (24hrs) before he got back to the beginning. Personally I couldn't be bothered.

[saxy_jag]

Whilst ebooks do seem to average around the £4 mark, many are cheaper and lots of classics are free because they're out of copyright.

How many times, though, do we buy books, either new or secondhand, and never read them. And how often do we buy or borrow a book, read it and then love it so much that it hurts to part with it? I can answer 'quite a lot' to both of these questions and I suspect I'm not the only one. On an ereader I can keep them for as long as I want without taking up any extra space. I think what the manufacturers intend to show by this selling point is that the capacity is pretty much enough for anyone no matter how often or seldom they read.

Yes, Amazon (and presumably the providers of Sony format books too) can withdraw their titles at any time, because what you buy is not the actual content, but the licence to it, for which the author receives a small royalty. However, I doubt they would or could do so without very good reason.