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The New Comic Thread for Monday, March 9, 2009
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Good. Better than not being able to afford them at all. Too many children are being denied an equal education because of financial situations. Sure Kindle or Kindle-like devices will never be free, but one day they will be so dirt cheap that the spread of public domain works and knowledge will be so great a lot of these problems are overcome.
Sure publishers will hate it, and authors will suffer in the end. Why buy Harry Potter 9 when you could download a 3mb e-book from the prate bay? Why not? But then again, even I as an author wouldn't feel too badly about that. Because while the downside is stolen copies, the upside is a vastly increased reader base to sell to.
If Amazon were smart and weren't losing money elsewhere then Kindle would cost almost nothing. You're selling people a store. I think if everyone had one, they would make all their money on impulse purchases and book sales through the system.
I can see Apple producing something very similar before long. Tied into iTunes and then bam, the whole world goes e-book crazy just like it did with mp3s. A good thing. Reading is something fucking brats these days never do.
Yes, this is what my fingers wanted to type. Also, Scarab has a great point about increasing the reader/customer base.
I could just let you borrow it
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How important is it for a reader base to be easily expressed in numerical terms? I imagine that being able to see purchase figures for books might influence publishers who are assessing the viability of future deals with the same author, and rampant piracy of books might reduce that number by enough to make deals with popular yet pirated authors less likely.
Although I don't think we've seen that with music piracy.
If you were selling a standard paper-back at only half-price of what you could get from Amazon, and you had it within minutes of purchase, I think people would go for it. You would also cut the cost of printing to a much smaller portion, thus increasing profits. Digital watermarks also have some catching up to do.
This is also years down the road.
Well the lost sales through piracy will be somewhat balanced by the reduced publishing costs. Unlike music or film where DVDs/CDs cost almost nothing to produce, there is still significant overhead when printing a 300 page paperback. There is the design of the cover, the various materials. Hardbacks, paperbacks, paper weight, density, gloss, non gloss etc.
You take out all of these costs you are effectively selling the word document the author sent you originally. Selling books online I think would be a very attractive prospect for publishers. You cut out distribution and transport costs (which are big, because books are heavy) and also you have all of the hugely restrictive regulations on recycling and sustainable forest stuff just vanish. Because it's all digital.
Why, hello there, Cory Doctorow.
This version would have been better, for sure!
no, don't do it!
concept is good, execution is fantastic
something about "but where are people going to keep all their Book?" and the expression on the guy's face are just too good
The thing about them though the don't really work as reference books.
I currently have two books splayed over my desk, several copied pages with notes all over them, and notes scribbled in all of my books.
They're good to sit back and read a book, but when you need to cross reference shit they kind of fall apart in their uses.
Satans..... hints.....
Stipulated. I'm fairly certain that someone would build an app to copy-paste with a stylus though. Just the basic hardware is still pretty awesome. And I should know because I'm pretty awesome.
I'm sure as the medium becomes more mainstream, these things will come in. Why not something like Ubuntu where you can have multiple books open at one time. A button to zoom out and see all of your open books. Touch one to zoom in on it. Touch something else to overlay some text notes. Just...touch all over the place. As for pages of notes themselves, you could probably still keep around some paper and pencils. Maybe. I'll have to check with google and see if they're cool with it.
On the black screen
I got it, but was disappointed he didn't say Fantastica
I would need at least three kindles on my desk for them to be useful.
But like I said, I would need the ability to actually write on the books.
Oh and don't they not display pdfs?
Cause that would be a bit necessary as well.
Satans..... hints.....
Fuck man, that's not being a pessimist, that's being a realist.
The college textbook racket is a finally honed scam -- with the campus bookstore, professors, and the publishers forming an unholy alliance to continually sell "new" updated versions (to kill the used book market) while charging ridiculous prices for tiny books.
I graduated 2 years ago, but I routinely spent $3-400 a term on textbooks, sometimes paying over 100$ for a single book. I remember my Geology book was $120, wasn't more than 1.5 inches thick, and couldn't be sold back to the bookstore because it came bundled with a CD (which was never used).
Text book publishers will never let the Kindle or similar device intrude on their scam.
thats a pretty broad range
Again, with people just being able to get books from the library and scan them in or pirate pre-scanned copies off the net, I'm not sure how textbook publishers are going to stop it from happening.
No you guys are looking at it wrong.
I don't think the publishers would have a problem with this, since they would still hold the right to those books. It woudl just mean that now they can make money without actually printing books. That's a fantastic concept for them, much like how DVDs raked in a ton more profit to the Motion Picture studios than what they were getting out of VHSs.
The problem, really, is that the college would no longer make as much money via the books. Which means, if/when digital books become pretty popular, tuition would go way up, and students who don't have the digital books would start suffering for it.
Unless, of course, the college bookstores acquire some exclusive deal on the distribution of a good selection of the books.
i finally live in an age where shit like this is said
goddamn it, science
Seriously if something super groundbreaking has entered the field between the previous edition and the new edition your professor is probably going to be discussing it in great detail during lectures and there'll probably be no less than a dozen academic articles that could be accessed at the college library or through the database.
Also books have historically been expensive as fuck. The Bible gets away with being cheap as balls because its printed on nearly transparent paper so Mormons can afford to give them away.
It also makes damn fine rolling paper in a pinch.
There's also the thing about cost decreases as production volume increases. The number of Bibles produced is so incredibly large that the actual unit-cost is ridiculously small compared to most books of similar thickness. Yeah, cheap-ass paper probably helps with that too.
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You can also use it that finest of mutineer standbys, The Black Spot.