On May 30, 2010, at 4:19 PM, Nadav Har'El wrote:
All of this would be fine if their business model was that of a
library.
After all, people don't normally check out books from a library and
go to
loan ("sublet") them to other people, and nobody would care if his
rented
book has any DRM on it - after all the all point of the eink display
is that
it will be much more convenient to read a book on it, not on a
general-purpose
computer.
As a disabled person, I really like the idea that a library can rent
number of digital copies of books, and lend them out over the internet
with DRM set to self destruct in 2 weeks. That way someone can check
them out and not bother to return them, at the end of two weeks, they
can lend them out again.
This is not exacly new, most bestseller books are rented by libraries,
not purchased. This allows them to have several copies of "hot" book
when it comes out, without eating up their investment and clogging the
shelves with many copies of a book only one or two people a year read.
As for the eInk display being better than an LCD, that's debatable. An
ARM based netbook with a 1024x768 LCD will run around 12 hours on a
charge of batteries, which is exactly what an iPad does. If you use a
slower processor, without custom video decoders on the chip, drop the
tough screen, etc, you really could sell them for $200 and get closer
to 20 hours of reading time on a charge.
This does not sound like a lot compared to eInk, but eInk is black
and white or a very limited grayscale only. If you look at the long
times between a charge claimed by eInk readers carefully, it shows
that they are not very accurate. They are based upon a reading rate
that many people don't actually read at.
In my case, I would burn through a charge in a day.
But this is NOT their business-model. While they continue to pretend
to be
*selling* books for 44 shekels each, while not actually selling you
all the
normal rights you'd expect - I consider such a device worthless.
Even if instead of 1400 shekels it would cost 400 shekels (and it
won't,
I don't see why everyone here is hoping for its price to
significantly drop -
they'll just have a new model that costs the same....)
That's why I used a frowny. I expect they will bomb and Steimatsky
will be selling them on close out to get rid of them. They will
definately lower the price to get people to buy their overpriced books.
All that really needs to happen is a competing chain convince B&N to
let them sell the Nook, or Amazon to sell the Kindle. Even without the
rights to sell their ebooks, there a lots of books available on the
internet. After all, MP3 players here do not suffer from a lack of
music. The only thing that will be missing is Hebrew and I'm sure
someone will figure out how to include it.
If not, it won't matter that much, anyone who uses the internet can
read English, and there are enough people here who can who would keep
the business going.
I've been accumulating books for 35 years now, and CDs for 25 years
now,
and they are all still usable, for me and my family (and/or anyone I
might
choose to give them to). If they guarantee that I could do the same
with
ebooks that I "buy" from them, I'll agree to buy from them.
Otherwise, this
is not buying, it's renting, and I want to pay the much lower book-
rental
prices on the market (last time I checked, this was known as a
"library", and
didn't cost 44 shekels every time you checked out a book.)
Although I doubt that I have any of the books I started accumulating
45 years ago, I do have the first CD's I bought in 1985. Actually I do
have the books, because they are out of copyright and I have digital
copies I downloaded.
As for libraries, Israel suffers because Andrew Carnegie was neither a
Jew nor a zionist, though only a librarian from the US is likely to
understand the comment.
It also suffers from the lack of good bookstores, when I made aliyah I
found that the local Border's I had left (a very small store,
originally considered too small to actually have the Border's name)
had more Linux books than the local Steimatsky's had in total. :-(
Geoff.
--
geoffrey mendelson N3OWJ/4X1GM
Jerusalem Israel geoffreymendel...@gmail.com
New word I coined 12/13/09, "Sub-Wikipedia" adj, describing knowledge
or understanding, as in he has a sub-wikipedia understanding of the
situation. i.e possessing less facts or information than can be found
in the Wikipedia.
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