Saturday, November 24, 2007

Electronic Books

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Amazon is the latest to try to move people away from paper printed books. Their new product is called Kindle. A wireless electronic reader.
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On the surface it looks really quite attractive. I came very close to putting my name on the waiting list. But then I did a little deeper research.
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Link: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000FI73MA/ref=pd_sl_aw_manual-1_kindle1_40650458_1

When you look closely into what books are available, and what everything costs, the Kindle quickly seems far less attractive. For example, you can't buy any of the Harry Potter books from the Kindle Store. There are a limited number of magazines and newspapers available, but the quality of the selection is high. So is the price of the subscriptions especially when you consider that most of this content is available for free on the internet. And the books are really fairly expensive.
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Out of 649 people who have reviewed it so far, out of 5 stars possible it has gotten an average of a little over 2 stars. Gosh, this is not good. Amazon has a great track record for success, but this product is going to fail horribly unless they greatly reduce the cost of content.

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