Saturday, August 7, 2010

Cartoon of the Day: Book Club

I posted this before, but now that I'm seriously contemplating the iPad, I thought I'd post again. 



9 comments:

michael said...

Funny cartoon but I still don't see how an e-book is not a book. This is a common comment you hear, that the Kindle will replace books. I want to scream that if the e-reader replaces anything it will be print not books.

Kerrie said...

I wouldn't buy an iPad just to read books Janet. I've bought my husband one, and he uses it for instant web access, and so far he hasn't touched the books I've downloaded for him into iBooks and the Kindle for PC App. I play the chess game :-)
Still Kindle for me.

Joe Barone said...

I prefer reading on e-readers. You can control the size of the type. I still have good eyesight, but I am aware that with aging I (who read a least two books a week) will eventually need what the e-reader brings.

The only problem I see with e-readers is that they are not well made. After only fifteen months, my Kindle broke. The plastic four-way button split diagonally making the machine unusable. Amazon offered to sell me another one at a price which is about what they are now selling their wireless model for. I couldn't see buying a new Kindle every fifteen months.

As poorly made as they seem to be, I think e-readers should be sold in the $50 - $80 range.

My new e-reader is one that does not tie me to a single store. To me, that's another problem with the Kindle.

Nancy Means Wright said...

Ha ha! But my engineer husband reads twice as many books as ever since I gave him a Kindle for Christmas. He is waiting for my new book to go on Kindle before he reads it. So it's not just kids excited about ebooks! We all have to accept it and re-adjust our thinking. Kind of like the civilized Romans when the "barbarian" hordes came swooping down to conquer Rome.

Janet Rudolph said...

What a good discussion with such divergent comments. The good and the bad of the eReader.

Priscilla said...

One other plus for the e-reader: classics are getting to be best-sellers again. This is fabulous. For all the debate on e-readers, I think anything that gets people back to reading (including the classics) cannot be all bad.

Sandie Herron said...

I don't see e-books and print books as mutually exclusive any more than hardcovers vs. paperbacks. I think that it would help if we took the view of e-books being just another form in which books are available. We've already got hardcovers, paperback, trade paperback, audiobook either on CD or MP3, and now e-books. I don't see them all as mutually exclusive. I've got some books in every one of those formats.

Vision problems have pushed me toward audiobooks and e-books lately but I'll never stop buying my 1st edition fiction.

Sal said...

I have a KindleDX, bought primarily because I drag boatloads of books along when I travel, but there are loads of things I've put on it. ... I have MIDDLEMARCH it! PGWodehouse! Preview chapters for a couple dozen books.

I don't tend to buy Kindle versions of current mysteries when the print price is way close because I can't pass a mystery on to a friend, saying, "You MUST READ THIS!"

One benefit of the Kindle is that I can drape myself in a chair to read and because you "turn the page" by pressing a button, I don't have to shift this way and that as the book becomes unwieldy or the page changes from recto to verso. Hadn't realized how much I shift around while I read.

Janet Rudolph said...

I'm thinking about getting the iPad for just those reasons.