Is the Amazon Kindle Really the iPod of Books?

I'm old fashioned-how can anyone replace the smell of a library or bookstore with a hand held device? When reading a good book, turning the pages is half the fun (also looking in the back at the end sometimes)when you're engrossed. Plus the feel of the different quality of paper used in books. Why is everyone always looking for a "lazier" way of doing things? What happens to a girl when a guy asks to carry her books..does she hand him her ipod, cell phone and e-reader?

Also, our library already has digital books available, but currently they cannot access to Apple products, The world is changing!

I will love it! I am a writer and have a book release soon. I will request my pubisher to release the pdf format, the the ebook for the Sony and the new format for the Kindle. I am purchasing both! I will test how my book reads on both!

Both these products will save a lot of trees. I love it!

I agree the price is high, however i feel this is perfect for travelers. I think it could use a light in the background for dark areas, but low light does still allow you to see the writing. I think its great (i have one) it also plays music i cant recall if it stated that. I think it would be even better if like someone mentioned earlier, if it read the books to you, almost like the books on disk. I seen a post about where the buttons are located....you CAN do it with one hand... on the left side is a prev page button and a next page button....on the right side a next page button and a back button. So you can use one hand for reading, one for eating lol. I didnt see any downfalls of this except for the lack of library......I'm sure amazon will take care of that soon though.

This is slightly unrelated, however, I love reading the comments people leave on the various AOL blogs. It just occured to me how much the creators of these products benefit from these blogs- they're getting the same honest feedback (or perhaps even MORE honest) as they would from a focus group - for FREE. They're getting new product ideas, ways to better their product, etc. etc. etc.

Fuckers.

Sharon says: "I keep reading about e-books and I wonder how they handle the indexes. What do you do to look up a specific item in non-fiction books? I use the indexed material in books will this function disappear? Can you, at least, search on names or terms? This is an inefficient way to find material since discussions of concepts are not always found by searching specific words, but it would be some help."

You can ALWAYS look up something in a computer file or ebook file easier and faster than you can in a print book. Well, almost always. Definitely on a computer. If you have a long ebook up to be read and you're searching it for a specific word that is used frequently, it might take two or three minutes to get to the last pages. I don't know how Kindle handles annotations and highlighting, but they are very easy to do with eBookWise.

The info on the Kindle mentions that you can set any of four type sizes. It explains what kind of thing you can use on it, including music. It explains how to download your own stuff, or Gutenberg stuff, to your computer free and then move it to your Kindle with the USB port. And if you BUY and KEEP all those zillions of books people keep talking about, you have to HAVE A PLACE TO STORE THEM.

And to the woman who says you would spend more time searching and downloading than you would reading, I reply, "You've gotta be kidding."
I have been using electronic book readers since the days of the first Rocket. Until the eBookWise came along I lived in terror that my Rocket might expire before I did. Five or six times a year I spend several hours on the Internet looking for new stuff to read. I have it set up so that Fictionwise and eBookWise send me messages whenever something I'm interested in becomes available, but I can take care of that kind of purchase in minutes. The rest of the time I just read. Often I plug my eBookWise reader in while I'm reading in bed, so that it recharges for whatever I want to do with it during the next day.

And good people, I can't AFFORD to rent an extra apartment to keep my books in. It was great while it lasted, but it's over now. I live two blocks from the library, so why should I have my own copies of every book Agatha Christie ever wrote? Other than the ebooks, which I can store by the thousands without using any physical space at all, I keep only books I am likely to need at two o'clock in the morning in a blizzard--those, and heavily illustrated books, especially about Egyptology. Meanwhile my husband, who isn't sold on ebooks, had to buy a LARGE garden shed in which to store his books, all sorted neatly into heavy plastic storage boxes. All, that is, except the fifteen or so storage boxes he has taking up room in my eBay stock room because they won't fit into the shed. At least a quarter of them--enough to free my stock room--are available free online.

Once I was sitting in the lobby of the building my doctor is in, waiting to be retrieved, when a ten-year-old boy saw what I was doing and asked if I was playing a computer game. I told him what I was doing, and told him how it worked. He said something along the lines of, "I really hate to read, but I'd read one of those."

Project Gutenberg's books are sent to the international space station. They are sent to research stations in Antarctica. There are mirror sites in every continent except Antarctica, and on several islands. A kid who goes to school by radio on a remote Australian sheep station, or a remote Alaskan research station, can have access to thousands of FREE books.

I like to show people my ebook reader and say, "Look, this is the future."

I see no likelihood that paper books will vanish in my lifetime, and I doubt they will ever totally vanish. But if I were to return to teaching on a college campus, I would assign my students only books that they could get free from Project Gutenberg, and I would ask them to bring either a good ebook reader or a notebook computer to class. Of course I teach creative writing, so an enormous quantity of the books I use ARE available free. That would not be the case if I taught physics or astronomy.

But those physics and astronomy textbooks that weigh sixty pounds in paperback and cost $200 are OUT OF DATE before they are off the presses. If they were stored in an ebook format--of course it would have to be something more advanced than is yet available for the astronomy, though the physics shouldn't be any trouble--automatic corrections could be sent out to all purchasers of the book.

Just think how many astronomy textbooks say there are nine planets in the solar system . . .

I'm seeing a lot of negativity in the posts on this topic. Don't look at it that way. Ask what it can do, not what it can't do. And then ask yourself--on 9/11 we all, wherever we were, were glued to television sets. But all air travellers were stuck in airports for days and days. Would they have been happier if they'd had six thousand books in their carry-on luggage? Or would they rather watch the Twin Towers falling down nine thousand times?

When I'm in the hospital, somebody has to make daily book runs for me, because if I don't have anything else to do I can read several books a day. It's really much easier for me to take thousands of books to the hospital with me.

Give me the ebooks any day. I don't travel without them, even to the grocery store. I am really astounded that so many people think ebook readers are gimmicks. They are not gimmicks; they are tools. You can't do everything with them, but I can't rewire a house with a hammer and chisel, either. Use them for what they are meant for, and go on using the library and buying paper books as necessary.

EBOOK READERS RULE!!!!!

I think that both of these products are great ideas but I'm waiting for one to include easy searches. I'm terrible at remembering names and particular details about people, including fictitous ones. I'd love to type in a name or particular event and have the book do a search of prior references. (Perhaps I am only speaking about us older readers!) These type of searches should be relatively easy to include. Otherwise I'll stick to the old fashioned way of reading and using my own search tools - specifically tabbed items. Thanks

A spate of eBook readers has hit the market recently with one or two yet to follow. The display candidate of the moment is the technology based on E Ink which rhymes with pink but has the visual value of oink to my eyes.

The background is gray and slightly hazy. I do not think that the visual effects of a book are very well presented. AND they all cost over three hundred dollars. A sum of money for which these days you can get a fully featured portable PC. Or for that matter more than half of an Iphone if you really like technology that much.

I am not a fan of any of the current crop of eBook readers but they are getting better at getting the size and weight close to right for the avid reader. E Ink readers have one major drawback: they are fragile and not as capable of living through a good drop to the floor from the bed – a criteria for books in my house.

My wife is a technocrat of the first order so I get to hold a lot of technology in these hands. New technology is not likely to impress me unless I think it will actually move the market. Take for example the Kindle, well named if you believe in burning books.

I seldom have used a book to start a fire, notice I did not say never. But the Kindle suffers from some interesting drawbacks. It is totally proprietary and makes no apologies about that fact. It also loses in the cost derby since it has no price advantage to go along with its other restrictions. Note that it cannot read protected PDF which is one of the most prevalent formats for eBooks sold today.

No! I think I will wait on a better technology than the current oink -- ER, E Ink -- crop before I buy another reader. Maybe the tablet PC will be back in a solid and simple light weight form before this is all over. An open standard and a really large memory with a lot of computing capability. Now that would be an eBook that didn't depend on a lot of new untried technology.

Wouldn't that be nice?

I think the price is a little steep. I am going to wait to see improvements as well as a price drop before I buy. I searched Amazon's website last night and found ebooks for all the authors I currently read. There are about 4 or 5 Prey books that I haven't been able to find but they were there in the Kindle store! I like the idea of a reader because I don't want to keep every book I read. Can't sell them for much of anything, so they just stack up.