For the near term, this is how it's going .... as a replacement for very expensive college textbooks. A very smart positioning of the new Kindle, IMO.
Size and weight, definitely, and it gets better with each text book you replace with an eBook. But there are problems. How many text books are in digital form for eBooks? Are the publishers still afraid of piracy to a point that they aren't releasing the books at all or are charging a lot of money for the digital format? And then there is the issue of books that have images that E-Ink just work with. I think this will market will grow with each new innovation but I think it's years before we see an ideal eBook for students that will be popular en masse.
For the near term, this is how it's going .... as a replacement for very expensive college textbooks. A very smart positioning of the new Kindle, IMO.
Of course, I could have quoted from the other article which shows a somewhat different perspective.
The point is that it's short term.
Someday, possibly, just possibly, if something very inexpensive, that can be made into something very easily collapsable, we might see a reader of some kind that's independent, but I still can't see a reason why.
Textbooks will likely be online, available from any device.
for everything else, size doesn't matter. Who cares about the size of the page?
Often I get a book, and it says 1300 pages, or so. Well, that's about 250 to 350 pages in a paperback, but so what?
I recently bought Gaimon's Coraline. Great book. With beautiful greyscale illustrations. On my iPhone, the illustrations looked very good. Nice shading, good detail. I could zoom in if I really wanted to see even more detail. On the kindle, it would look poorly. 16 shades from grey to grey.
This new Kindle is apparently being pushed not so much for textbooks, for which a color version would be needed in many cases, but for newspapers. The Forbes article shows why this won't work.
I'm talking newspapers. Is there an App for NYT, WSJ, NYPost? I am under the impression that books are the only thing that works for what you describe. And the Kindle itself only accepts newspapers, magazines.
I have apps for the NY Times, the WSJ, API, Bloomberg, the ABA Journal, and there are others I haven't gotten yet.
More are coming out all the time.
If you have an iPhone,, though I think you said you have the iTouch, you should check them out. They will work on the Touch as well, as long as WiFi can be used.
I also have various sports programs, so I can follow that, often live.
So I have SportsMobile, Golf Tracker, Masters, MBL At Bat 2009.
Of course, I could have quoted from the other article which shows a somewhat different perspective.
The point is that it's short term.
Someday, possibly, just possibly, if something very inexpensive, that can be made into something very easily collapsable, we might see a reader of some kind that's independent, but I still can't see a reason why.
Textbooks will likely be online, available from any device.
for everything else, size doesn't matter. Who cares about the size of the page?
Often I get a book, and it says 1300 pages, or so. Well, that's about 250 to 350 pages in a paperback, but so what?
I recently bought Gaimon's Coraline. Great book. With beautiful greyscale illustrations. On my iPhone, the illustrations looked very good. Nice shading, good detail. I could zoom in if I really wanted to see even more detail. On the kindle, it would look poorly. 16 shades from grey to grey.
This new Kindle is apparently being pushed not so much for textbooks, for which a color version would be needed in many cases, but for newspapers. The Forbes article shows why this won't work.
Three points...
First, if I recall correctly, type-heavy textbooks with black and white illustrations would be perfect for this new Kindle. These are the majority of college texts, ignoring for the moment medical textbooks and other books where color is essential to the display of information.
Second, Amazon's DRM is what keeps these texts from being turned into PDFs and posted on the Net for anyone at no cost.
Third, we don't yet know if the Kindle-to-be-announced has color or not.
Size and weight, definitely, and it gets better with each text book you replace with an eBook. But there are problems. How many text books are in digital form for eBooks? Are the publishers still afraid of piracy to a point that they aren't releasing the books at all or are charging a lot of money for the digital format? And then there is the issue of books that have images that E-Ink just work with. I think this will market will grow with each new innovation but I think it's years before we see an ideal eBook for students that will be popular en masse.
I see other problems for this as a specialized device regarding textbooks.
For K-12, there is a need to bring the books back and forth from class to home, and back again. Which ones varies with the day, though some are needed every day.
Do we want children carrying a reader like this around where someone might want to steal it? We already have that problem with phones and iPods. Younger kids would not be the market. Parents aren't going to want to risk their kids carrying something this large that's also valuable.
As for college, well, there, you don't have to carry textbooks around all the time, so is this really needed?
All college students will need a laptop anyway. Would they really want this in addition? With laptop weight coming down, that isn't much of an issue. Battery power is more of an issue, but that's getting better as well.
First, if I recall correctly, type-heavy textbooks with black and white illustrations would be perfect for this new Kindle. These are the majority of college texts, ignoring for the moment medical textbooks and other books where color is essential to the display of information.
Actually, this isn't true. I have worked at a major University for 20 years and almost all the textbooks are colour all the way and have been for at least 10 years or so. If there is only a black and white option, I would say that leaves out at least half, if not three quarters of all textbooks.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SpamSandwich
... Second, Amazon's DRM is what keeps these texts from being turned into PDFs and posted on the Net for anyone at no cost.
True, but the majority of the material in the books is public domain. Who's to say it would be a bad thing if students didn't have to pay hundreds of dollars a book for stuff that is not actually copyrighted?
Quote:
Originally Posted by SpamSandwich
... Third, we don't yet know if the Kindle-to-be-announced has color or not.
This is true.
The reason most textbooks are now colour is that it's a kind of "value added" thing that the publishers use to differentiate their product and to drive sales. Often all that's been done is to take a public domain black and white illustration and re-do it in colour so as to make it copyrightable and unique to that publisher. Also, there is a lot of cow-towing to the authors (professors), and expensive giveaways involving transparencies, slides, multi-media add-ons etc. again to drive sales and also as a kickback to the professors who decide what books are used.
I'm not trying to be too dramatic, but anyone who's been involved in this business to any degree knows that it's a terrible scam that's been going on for thirty years or more. It's only these (corrupt) market forces that are keeping the cost of the textbook in the hundreds of dollars, and it's a market that's totally overdue for a gigantic collapse.
Here's hoping that whatever reading devices eventually emerge also work for PDF's so that we can finally free the students from this horrible anti-consumer system.
First, if I recall correctly, type-heavy textbooks with black and white illustrations would be perfect for this new Kindle. These are the majority of college texts, ignoring for the moment medical textbooks and other books where color is essential to the display of information.
Second, Amazon's DRM is what keeps these texts from being turned into PDFs and posted on the Net for anyone at no cost.
Third, we don't yet know if the Kindle-to-be-announced has color or not.
But that's not something that can't be done with a notebook. That's the whole point here. This really serves little purpose.
College students NEED a laptop. It's become a requirement at almost all colleges. They don't need a book reader.
As I said to Sol a few moments ago, college students don't have the need to carry textbooks around all the time anyway. And if they do, they may as well do it with their notebooks. And those are already in color.
If Amazon introduces a color Kindle Wednesday, it will cost almost as much as an Apple notebook, the Macbook, and more than many cheaper PC devices.
I see other problems for this as a specialized device regarding textbooks.
For K-12, there is a need to bring the books back and forth from class to home, and back again. Which ones varies with the day, though some are needed every day.
Do we want children carrying a reader like this around where someone might want to steal it? We already have that problem with phones and iPods. Younger kids would not be the market. Parents aren't going to want to risk their kids carrying something this large that's also valuable.
As for college, well, there, you don't have to carry textbooks around all the time, so is this really needed?
All college students will need a laptop anyway. Would they really want this in addition? With laptop weight coming down, that isn't much of an issue. Battery power is more of an issue, but that's getting better as well.
Those are all valid reasons why it won't work... right now. The tech just isn't at a place to make it usual and it's too costly to make it a good replacement. I think the shift will eventually happen but it will be years from now before we'll even start to see a real shift to paperless textbooks.
Actually, this isn't true. I have worked at a major University for 20 years and almost all the textbooks are colour all the way and have been for at least 10 years or so. If there is only a black and white option, I would say that leaves out at least half, if not three quarters of all textbooks.
True, but the majority of the material in the books is public domain. Who's to say it would be a bad thing if students didn't have to pay hundreds of dollars a book for stuff that is not actually copyrighted?
This is true.
The reason most textbooks are now colour is that it's a kind of "value added" thing that the publishers use to differentiate their product and to drive sales. Often all that's been done is to take a public domain black and white illustration and re-do it in colour so as to make it copyrightable and unique to that publisher. Also, there is a lot of cow-towing to the authors (professors), and expensive giveaways involving transparencies, slides, multi-media add-ons etc. again to drive sales and also as a kickback to the professors who decide what books are used.
I'm not trying to be too dramatic, but anyone who's been involved in this business to any degree knows that it's a terrible scam that's been going on for thirty years or more. It's only these (corrupt) market forces that are keeping the cost of the textbook in the hundreds of dollars, and it's a market that's totally overdue for a gigantic collapse.
Here's hoping that whatever reading devices eventually emerge also work for PDF's so that we can finally free the students from this horrible anti-consumer system.
Another reason why many textbooks cost so much though is that other than being large, that is having a lot of pages to print, is that there are few being sold. Sometimes no more than a few hundred copies of a particular text. The ones that sell in the thousands are much cheaper, though until you publish several tens of thousands, costs can remain fairly high.
Also, a lot of the material is NOT public domain, though some is.
The problem about color is that while some illustrations may be reworked greyscale, much is not, and the color is a required part of the image. When that's true, often reproducing it in greyscale results in an illegible image. I hate to think of my Grey's Anatomy in greyscale, esp. greyscale that's just 16 greys, going from grey to grey.
But that's not something that can't be done with a notebook. That's the whole point here. This really serves little purpose.
College students NEED a laptop. It's become a requirement at almost all colleges. They don't need a book reader.
As I said to Sol a few moments ago, college students don't have the need to carry textbooks around all the time anyway. And if they do, they may as well do it with their notebooks. And those are already in color.
If Amazon introduces a color Kindle Wednesday, it will cost almost as much as an Apple notebook, the Macbook, and more than many cheaper PC devices.
Yes, they NEED a laptop, but AFAIK textbooks are not being sold in electronic form for use on laptops. True or not? Like I said, publishers need DRM on their product or it may as well simply be free. There is just NO WAY they are going to make their bread and butter PDFs and open to theft. This "CollegeKindle" is a win for students, publishers and Amazon, and I'm sure the publishers can even afford to subsidize it to a degree to make the hardware cheaper and maintain their margins on the digitized information.
Those are all valid reasons why it won't work... right now. The tech just isn't at a place to make it usual and it's too costly to make it a good replacement. I think the shift will eventually happen but it will be years from now before we'll even start to see a real shift to paperless textbooks.
But by then the computer will be a reader as well.
I don't get it. People here have seen how far things have come. It's as though no one can imagine that things will go further.
At some point, the average portable computer will have everything needed in power, battery life, graphics, weight, size etc. to do what people want them to. There will be no need for a separate device to read books or newspapers.
This computer may not even look like a computer. It may be a 1/16" thick roll that's kept in a pocket designed for that purpose. Who knows?
But people won't have something just to read books and newspapers.
But by then the computer will be a reader as well.
I don't get it. People here have seen how far things have come. It's as though no one can imagine that things will go further.
At some point, the average portable computer will have everything needed in power, battery life, graphics, weight, size etc. to do what people want them to. There will be no need for a separate device to read books or newspapers.
This computer may not even look like a computer. It may be a 1/16" thick roll that's kept in a pocket designed for that purpose. Who knows?
But people won't have something just to read books and newspapers.
The "CollegeKindle" will fill the market of today. The flexible, glossy, high res e-reader of tomorrow may cost $10 and be the size of a magazine.
Yes, they NEED a laptop, but AFAIK textbooks are not being sold in electronic form for use on laptops. True or not? Like I said, publishers need DRM on their product or it may as well simply be free. There is just NO WAY they are going to make their bread and butter PDFs and open to theft. This "CollegeKindle" is a win for students, publishers and Amazon, and I'm sure the publishers can even afford to subsidize it to a degree to make the hardware cheaper and maintain their margins on the digitized information.
Publishers will do what they must.
You think only the Kindle has books in DRM? Every single company that's been selling electronic books for years has DRM. The books on my iPhone have DRM. This is nothing that the Kindle can say they're unique in.
When a publisher looks at how many books it can sell, do you think they will look to the 500,000 or so Kindle's that have sold, to the over 50 crowd, it seems, for a large part of the sales? Not much of a market for textbooks there.
So I don't think so.
I know the iPhone is too small for many textbooks, but netbooks aren't, neither are notebooks.
I haven't seen one argument here yet that spells out just why a book reader is so very specially suited to a college student that they would prefer to have it with them rather than their computer.
And as time goes on, and computers get lighter, with better better run times, that reason, whatever it might be, will get even more tenuous.
The "CollegeKindle" will fill the market of today. The flexible, glossy, high res e-reader of tomorrow may cost $10 and be the size of a magazine.
Those are pretty big assumptions.
With what is available for the Kindle today, which is almost nothing, I don't see it as being useful now. There are thousands of textbooks, how many are available for the Kindle?
I also don't see it costing $10 in the future. I also thought people didn't like glossy.
Revolting! She has a really bad case of epidermis all up and down that arm.
/likes real women
touché.
This is a good direction. I had two open book exams during university where there was so much medical reference material we had to bring it to the exam in suitcases on wheels.
Textbook publishers could be tempted to push for this if only to prevent students buying second hand copies of their texts via the inevitable DRM, not to mention the drastic reduction in manufacturing costs.
Are you serious? You expect people to hold up a big tablet and balance it in one hand while touch typing on the virtual keyboard with the other!? Do you have any idea how uncomfortable and slow that would be?
Why force people to type on a big piece of glass when a MultiTouch trackpad-sized display would not only enable the MultiTouch gestures already built into Mac OS X (and used by a number of Apple's bundled applications), but also enable direct touch manipulation of elements pulled down from the main display and/or widgets that let you turn down the volume, place/move pins on a map, draw on photos, turn dials in GarageBand, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera?
good points . i just felt that we could make a virtual track pad . err just like the key pad .. anyway i was just dreamng ..
Comments
For the near term, this is how it's going .... as a replacement for very expensive college textbooks. A very smart positioning of the new Kindle, IMO.
Size and weight, definitely, and it gets better with each text book you replace with an eBook. But there are problems. How many text books are in digital form for eBooks? Are the publishers still afraid of piracy to a point that they aren't releasing the books at all or are charging a lot of money for the digital format? And then there is the issue of books that have images that E-Ink just work with. I think this will market will grow with each new innovation but I think it's years before we see an ideal eBook for students that will be popular en masse.
For the near term, this is how it's going .... as a replacement for very expensive college textbooks. A very smart positioning of the new Kindle, IMO.
Of course, I could have quoted from the other article which shows a somewhat different perspective.
The point is that it's short term.
Someday, possibly, just possibly, if something very inexpensive, that can be made into something very easily collapsable, we might see a reader of some kind that's independent, but I still can't see a reason why.
Textbooks will likely be online, available from any device.
for everything else, size doesn't matter. Who cares about the size of the page?
Often I get a book, and it says 1300 pages, or so. Well, that's about 250 to 350 pages in a paperback, but so what?
I recently bought Gaimon's Coraline. Great book. With beautiful greyscale illustrations. On my iPhone, the illustrations looked very good. Nice shading, good detail. I could zoom in if I really wanted to see even more detail. On the kindle, it would look poorly. 16 shades from grey to grey.
This new Kindle is apparently being pushed not so much for textbooks, for which a color version would be needed in many cases, but for newspapers. The Forbes article shows why this won't work.
I'm talking newspapers. Is there an App for NYT, WSJ, NYPost? I am under the impression that books are the only thing that works for what you describe. And the Kindle itself only accepts newspapers, magazines.
I have apps for the NY Times, the WSJ, API, Bloomberg, the ABA Journal, and there are others I haven't gotten yet.
More are coming out all the time.
If you have an iPhone,, though I think you said you have the iTouch, you should check them out. They will work on the Touch as well, as long as WiFi can be used.
I also have various sports programs, so I can follow that, often live.
So I have SportsMobile, Golf Tracker, Masters, MBL At Bat 2009.
Of course, I could have quoted from the other article which shows a somewhat different perspective.
The point is that it's short term.
Someday, possibly, just possibly, if something very inexpensive, that can be made into something very easily collapsable, we might see a reader of some kind that's independent, but I still can't see a reason why.
Textbooks will likely be online, available from any device.
for everything else, size doesn't matter. Who cares about the size of the page?
Often I get a book, and it says 1300 pages, or so. Well, that's about 250 to 350 pages in a paperback, but so what?
I recently bought Gaimon's Coraline. Great book. With beautiful greyscale illustrations. On my iPhone, the illustrations looked very good. Nice shading, good detail. I could zoom in if I really wanted to see even more detail. On the kindle, it would look poorly. 16 shades from grey to grey.
This new Kindle is apparently being pushed not so much for textbooks, for which a color version would be needed in many cases, but for newspapers. The Forbes article shows why this won't work.
Three points...
First, if I recall correctly, type-heavy textbooks with black and white illustrations would be perfect for this new Kindle. These are the majority of college texts, ignoring for the moment medical textbooks and other books where color is essential to the display of information.
Second, Amazon's DRM is what keeps these texts from being turned into PDFs and posted on the Net for anyone at no cost.
Third, we don't yet know if the Kindle-to-be-announced has color or not.
Size and weight, definitely, and it gets better with each text book you replace with an eBook. But there are problems. How many text books are in digital form for eBooks? Are the publishers still afraid of piracy to a point that they aren't releasing the books at all or are charging a lot of money for the digital format? And then there is the issue of books that have images that E-Ink just work with. I think this will market will grow with each new innovation but I think it's years before we see an ideal eBook for students that will be popular en masse.
I see other problems for this as a specialized device regarding textbooks.
For K-12, there is a need to bring the books back and forth from class to home, and back again. Which ones varies with the day, though some are needed every day.
Do we want children carrying a reader like this around where someone might want to steal it? We already have that problem with phones and iPods. Younger kids would not be the market. Parents aren't going to want to risk their kids carrying something this large that's also valuable.
As for college, well, there, you don't have to carry textbooks around all the time, so is this really needed?
All college students will need a laptop anyway. Would they really want this in addition? With laptop weight coming down, that isn't much of an issue. Battery power is more of an issue, but that's getting better as well.
Three points...
First, if I recall correctly, type-heavy textbooks with black and white illustrations would be perfect for this new Kindle. These are the majority of college texts, ignoring for the moment medical textbooks and other books where color is essential to the display of information.
Actually, this isn't true. I have worked at a major University for 20 years and almost all the textbooks are colour all the way and have been for at least 10 years or so. If there is only a black and white option, I would say that leaves out at least half, if not three quarters of all textbooks.
... Second, Amazon's DRM is what keeps these texts from being turned into PDFs and posted on the Net for anyone at no cost.
True, but the majority of the material in the books is public domain. Who's to say it would be a bad thing if students didn't have to pay hundreds of dollars a book for stuff that is not actually copyrighted?
... Third, we don't yet know if the Kindle-to-be-announced has color or not.
This is true.
The reason most textbooks are now colour is that it's a kind of "value added" thing that the publishers use to differentiate their product and to drive sales. Often all that's been done is to take a public domain black and white illustration and re-do it in colour so as to make it copyrightable and unique to that publisher. Also, there is a lot of cow-towing to the authors (professors), and expensive giveaways involving transparencies, slides, multi-media add-ons etc. again to drive sales and also as a kickback to the professors who decide what books are used.
I'm not trying to be too dramatic, but anyone who's been involved in this business to any degree knows that it's a terrible scam that's been going on for thirty years or more. It's only these (corrupt) market forces that are keeping the cost of the textbook in the hundreds of dollars, and it's a market that's totally overdue for a gigantic collapse.
Here's hoping that whatever reading devices eventually emerge also work for PDF's so that we can finally free the students from this horrible anti-consumer system.
Three points...
First, if I recall correctly, type-heavy textbooks with black and white illustrations would be perfect for this new Kindle. These are the majority of college texts, ignoring for the moment medical textbooks and other books where color is essential to the display of information.
Second, Amazon's DRM is what keeps these texts from being turned into PDFs and posted on the Net for anyone at no cost.
Third, we don't yet know if the Kindle-to-be-announced has color or not.
But that's not something that can't be done with a notebook. That's the whole point here. This really serves little purpose.
College students NEED a laptop. It's become a requirement at almost all colleges. They don't need a book reader.
As I said to Sol a few moments ago, college students don't have the need to carry textbooks around all the time anyway. And if they do, they may as well do it with their notebooks. And those are already in color.
If Amazon introduces a color Kindle Wednesday, it will cost almost as much as an Apple notebook, the Macbook, and more than many cheaper PC devices.
I see other problems for this as a specialized device regarding textbooks.
For K-12, there is a need to bring the books back and forth from class to home, and back again. Which ones varies with the day, though some are needed every day.
Do we want children carrying a reader like this around where someone might want to steal it? We already have that problem with phones and iPods. Younger kids would not be the market. Parents aren't going to want to risk their kids carrying something this large that's also valuable.
As for college, well, there, you don't have to carry textbooks around all the time, so is this really needed?
All college students will need a laptop anyway. Would they really want this in addition? With laptop weight coming down, that isn't much of an issue. Battery power is more of an issue, but that's getting better as well.
Those are all valid reasons why it won't work... right now. The tech just isn't at a place to make it usual and it's too costly to make it a good replacement. I think the shift will eventually happen but it will be years from now before we'll even start to see a real shift to paperless textbooks.
Actually, this isn't true. I have worked at a major University for 20 years and almost all the textbooks are colour all the way and have been for at least 10 years or so. If there is only a black and white option, I would say that leaves out at least half, if not three quarters of all textbooks.
True, but the majority of the material in the books is public domain. Who's to say it would be a bad thing if students didn't have to pay hundreds of dollars a book for stuff that is not actually copyrighted?
This is true.
The reason most textbooks are now colour is that it's a kind of "value added" thing that the publishers use to differentiate their product and to drive sales. Often all that's been done is to take a public domain black and white illustration and re-do it in colour so as to make it copyrightable and unique to that publisher. Also, there is a lot of cow-towing to the authors (professors), and expensive giveaways involving transparencies, slides, multi-media add-ons etc. again to drive sales and also as a kickback to the professors who decide what books are used.
I'm not trying to be too dramatic, but anyone who's been involved in this business to any degree knows that it's a terrible scam that's been going on for thirty years or more. It's only these (corrupt) market forces that are keeping the cost of the textbook in the hundreds of dollars, and it's a market that's totally overdue for a gigantic collapse.
Here's hoping that whatever reading devices eventually emerge also work for PDF's so that we can finally free the students from this horrible anti-consumer system.
Another reason why many textbooks cost so much though is that other than being large, that is having a lot of pages to print, is that there are few being sold. Sometimes no more than a few hundred copies of a particular text. The ones that sell in the thousands are much cheaper, though until you publish several tens of thousands, costs can remain fairly high.
Also, a lot of the material is NOT public domain, though some is.
The problem about color is that while some illustrations may be reworked greyscale, much is not, and the color is a required part of the image. When that's true, often reproducing it in greyscale results in an illegible image. I hate to think of my Grey's Anatomy in greyscale, esp. greyscale that's just 16 greys, going from grey to grey.
But that's not something that can't be done with a notebook. That's the whole point here. This really serves little purpose.
College students NEED a laptop. It's become a requirement at almost all colleges. They don't need a book reader.
As I said to Sol a few moments ago, college students don't have the need to carry textbooks around all the time anyway. And if they do, they may as well do it with their notebooks. And those are already in color.
If Amazon introduces a color Kindle Wednesday, it will cost almost as much as an Apple notebook, the Macbook, and more than many cheaper PC devices.
Yes, they NEED a laptop, but AFAIK textbooks are not being sold in electronic form for use on laptops. True or not? Like I said, publishers need DRM on their product or it may as well simply be free. There is just NO WAY they are going to make their bread and butter PDFs and open to theft. This "CollegeKindle" is a win for students, publishers and Amazon, and I'm sure the publishers can even afford to subsidize it to a degree to make the hardware cheaper and maintain their margins on the digitized information.
Those are all valid reasons why it won't work... right now. The tech just isn't at a place to make it usual and it's too costly to make it a good replacement. I think the shift will eventually happen but it will be years from now before we'll even start to see a real shift to paperless textbooks.
But by then the computer will be a reader as well.
I don't get it. People here have seen how far things have come. It's as though no one can imagine that things will go further.
At some point, the average portable computer will have everything needed in power, battery life, graphics, weight, size etc. to do what people want them to. There will be no need for a separate device to read books or newspapers.
This computer may not even look like a computer. It may be a 1/16" thick roll that's kept in a pocket designed for that purpose. Who knows?
But people won't have something just to read books and newspapers.
I hate to think of my Grey's Anatomy in greyscale, esp. greyscale that's just 16 greys, going from grey to grey.
I know! Dr. McDreamy would look ashen in sixteen shades of gray. And Sandra Oh would be Sandra Ugh!
But by then the computer will be a reader as well.
I don't get it. People here have seen how far things have come. It's as though no one can imagine that things will go further.
At some point, the average portable computer will have everything needed in power, battery life, graphics, weight, size etc. to do what people want them to. There will be no need for a separate device to read books or newspapers.
This computer may not even look like a computer. It may be a 1/16" thick roll that's kept in a pocket designed for that purpose. Who knows?
But people won't have something just to read books and newspapers.
The "CollegeKindle" will fill the market of today. The flexible, glossy, high res e-reader of tomorrow may cost $10 and be the size of a magazine.
Yes, they NEED a laptop, but AFAIK textbooks are not being sold in electronic form for use on laptops. True or not? Like I said, publishers need DRM on their product or it may as well simply be free. There is just NO WAY they are going to make their bread and butter PDFs and open to theft. This "CollegeKindle" is a win for students, publishers and Amazon, and I'm sure the publishers can even afford to subsidize it to a degree to make the hardware cheaper and maintain their margins on the digitized information.
Publishers will do what they must.
You think only the Kindle has books in DRM? Every single company that's been selling electronic books for years has DRM. The books on my iPhone have DRM. This is nothing that the Kindle can say they're unique in.
When a publisher looks at how many books it can sell, do you think they will look to the 500,000 or so Kindle's that have sold, to the over 50 crowd, it seems, for a large part of the sales? Not much of a market for textbooks there.
So I don't think so.
I know the iPhone is too small for many textbooks, but netbooks aren't, neither are notebooks.
I haven't seen one argument here yet that spells out just why a book reader is so very specially suited to a college student that they would prefer to have it with them rather than their computer.
And as time goes on, and computers get lighter, with better better run times, that reason, whatever it might be, will get even more tenuous.
The "CollegeKindle" will fill the market of today. The flexible, glossy, high res e-reader of tomorrow may cost $10 and be the size of a magazine.
Those are pretty big assumptions.
With what is available for the Kindle today, which is almost nothing, I don't see it as being useful now. There are thousands of textbooks, how many are available for the Kindle?
I also don't see it costing $10 in the future. I also thought people didn't like glossy.
Revolting! She has a really bad case of epidermis all up and down that arm.
/likes real women
touché.
This is a good direction. I had two open book exams during university where there was so much medical reference material we had to bring it to the exam in suitcases on wheels.
Textbook publishers could be tempted to push for this if only to prevent students buying second hand copies of their texts via the inevitable DRM, not to mention the drastic reduction in manufacturing costs.
I also thought people didn't like glossy.
After going through all the complaints here...
Are you serious? You expect people to hold up a big tablet and balance it in one hand while touch typing on the virtual keyboard with the other!? Do you have any idea how uncomfortable and slow that would be?
Why force people to type on a big piece of glass when a MultiTouch trackpad-sized display would not only enable the MultiTouch gestures already built into Mac OS X (and used by a number of Apple's bundled applications), but also enable direct touch manipulation of elements pulled down from the main display and/or widgets that let you turn down the volume, place/move pins on a map, draw on photos, turn dials in GarageBand, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera?
good points . i just felt that we could make a virtual track pad . err just like the key pad .. anyway i was just dreamng ..
peace
? http://www.wikihow.com/Use-English-P...tion-Correctly
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stop
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