Amazon Wants You To Read on the Kindle:
Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos announced the latest version of its eBook reader, the Kindle 2, to much fanfare in New York. Now the battle royal begins among it, Sony, and Google to deliver the content you are desperate to read.
NOTE: The devise costs $359.
NOTE: You can buy one of the new mini/9-inch computers for less than this, and its screen will be in color.
NOTE: Text books are still not available.
NOTE: Book lovers still prefer paper by a ratio of 99 to 1.
NOTE: Book sales continue to drop.
NOTE: The number of people who choose to read for entertainment or personal enrichment has been in steady decline for half a century. (Do you really think non readers have just been waiting for a killer electronic device?)
Full disclosure: I own thousands of books. I frequently use the library and have half a dozen books checked out at this time. I sometimes buy books from Amazon. And I've been involved in the eBook business for a dozen years.
(Read The New York Times' story here. The page provides a link to an interview with Bezos too, and you can listen to him talk about how he wants the device to disappear.)
In Other Important News:
Darren Gladstone reports in PC World that "game playing" may be a good way to enhance your résumé. It appears that The World of Warcraft, also known as WoW, might provide the best skills currently. The problem might be with who reads the résumé.
You might be able to organize fifty online players into a team that will follow you and adhere to your plan in accomplishing a specific goal, but will your employer buy what you've been able to accomplish within the framework of the computer gaming world as a skill that he or she can exploit in the workplace?
Or will this prospective employer simply conclude that you can only have achieved this by not doing the work you should have been doing, like what ever it was you were being paid to do or the school work your instructors expected of you. (Phew! That was wordy, but I'll bet you know what I mean, right? Hate those rhetorical questions, don't you? Don't bother to answer that.)
In the Really, Really Important News:
Obama took his show on the road today, dragging along part of the congress, into the hinterlands of … Indiana! The results might be available tomorrow.
Hey! I've been to Indiana, or as we like to say where I'm from, I've been through Indiana. It's a lot like Illinois and Ohio. Or for that matter Kentucky, just a bit further north.
Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos announced the latest version of its eBook reader, the Kindle 2, to much fanfare in New York. Now the battle royal begins among it, Sony, and Google to deliver the content you are desperate to read.
NOTE: The devise costs $359.
NOTE: You can buy one of the new mini/9-inch computers for less than this, and its screen will be in color.
NOTE: Text books are still not available.
NOTE: Book lovers still prefer paper by a ratio of 99 to 1.
NOTE: Book sales continue to drop.
NOTE: The number of people who choose to read for entertainment or personal enrichment has been in steady decline for half a century. (Do you really think non readers have just been waiting for a killer electronic device?)
Full disclosure: I own thousands of books. I frequently use the library and have half a dozen books checked out at this time. I sometimes buy books from Amazon. And I've been involved in the eBook business for a dozen years.
(Read The New York Times' story here. The page provides a link to an interview with Bezos too, and you can listen to him talk about how he wants the device to disappear.)
In Other Important News:
Darren Gladstone reports in PC World that "game playing" may be a good way to enhance your résumé. It appears that The World of Warcraft, also known as WoW, might provide the best skills currently. The problem might be with who reads the résumé.
You might be able to organize fifty online players into a team that will follow you and adhere to your plan in accomplishing a specific goal, but will your employer buy what you've been able to accomplish within the framework of the computer gaming world as a skill that he or she can exploit in the workplace?
Or will this prospective employer simply conclude that you can only have achieved this by not doing the work you should have been doing, like what ever it was you were being paid to do or the school work your instructors expected of you. (Phew! That was wordy, but I'll bet you know what I mean, right? Hate those rhetorical questions, don't you? Don't bother to answer that.)
In the Really, Really Important News:
Obama took his show on the road today, dragging along part of the congress, into the hinterlands of … Indiana! The results might be available tomorrow.
Hey! I've been to Indiana, or as we like to say where I'm from, I've been through Indiana. It's a lot like Illinois and Ohio. Or for that matter Kentucky, just a bit further north.
Labels: Literature, Politics, The Economy
posted by Jim | 6:04 PM
1 Comments:
As someone who reads all sorts of texts from the internet, I don't think that books in an electronic format make a whole lot of sense unless they are vastly less expensive than books in print. Reading off a screen is much harder on your eyes, and I personally think that being able to scribble notes on the page improves comprehension and retention.
I've also never known anyone who said they read more once they realized material was available for download--even when the material was available for free.
The Kindle, and other hardware like it, is just a poor business move.
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