Hugh has a great post on books versus ebooks. Well worth the read. It also includes a list of places you can get free ebooks. A teaser:
Reading an ebooks is just “another way” to be reading, it’s not necessarily a replacement of a hard copy of a book. After all, I prefer to talk to people face-to-face, but I recognize the utility of the telephone. One does not replace the other. In fact, they are complimentary. I’d suggest the same could be said of ebooks and books.
And, if I haven’t convinced you about ebooks, consider this: you could spread the entire corpus of written human knowledge (pre-1923) everywhere in the world, essentially for free, using ubiquitous ebook readers already in the hands of just about every teacher in even the poorest countries in the world: that is, the mobile phone.
While you’re at it, check out the Book Oven Blog, a great place for lovers of books, making books, and our relationship with text.
October 29th, 2008 at 12:37 am
I’ve been drooling over Amazon’s Kindle for months, but the inability to highlight passages and make notes is a non-starter for me. Plus, I like the pretentious look of a stuffed library.
December 13th, 2009 at 10:57 pm
I was one of the first to buy the original Kindle, and quite frankly found it to be a big nuisance. It would frequently hang requiring resetting, and the page control buttons were too long and always in the way. Consequently, I didn’t use it much.
Kindle 2 so far, as a reader, has been flawless. The battery lasts for about 3 days of heavy use; the built in dictionary works; it remembers where I am in every document; Amazon converted my purchase history to the new device automatically; The new case attaches in a much more robust way; I like it and use it.