just treated myself to the new amazon kindle!

[Piemaster]

Waterproof covers are available too, just bigger versions of the 'aquapack' mobile phone type covers.
This also enables you to do something that is very difficult with a book - read in the shower. Though I can't think of why anyone would want to.

 

[Night Train]

I would be tempted with some kind of 'ebook' but I already have 1500+ books on my shelves in both text and images. The 'ebook' would need to be able to replicate the detail in the colour images and the graphs and tables of data in my reference books adn I am not sure they can.

Also I would want to be able to download my whole existing library at no additional cost.
It is the thing that made me move over to an MP3 player, that I could copy over all my existing music from all formats to the player. I doubt I could do that with my book library, yet.

Maybe one day an 'ebook' will come with a scanner that will read the book title and publisher and then automatically download the book at no charge.
There would need to be an electronic resource that contained every book ever published for that to happen though as well as a means to prove that I have already paid for the book once so will not be billed for downloading it.

 

[vikingcyclist]

Maybe one day an 'ebook' will come with a scanner that will read the book title and publisher and then automatically download the book at no charge.
There would need to be an electronic resource that contained every book ever published for that to happen though as well as a means to prove that I have already paid for the book once so will not be billed for downloading it.

Unlikely though, unless it also destroyed the physical copy of the book.

I've just accepted the fact that I won't be able to get all of my old library onto it without paying, and am currently focussing on books I don't already have instead.

 

[ianrauk]

I would be tempted with some kind of 'ebook' but I already have 1500+ books on my shelves in both text and images. The 'ebook' would need to be able to replicate the detail in the colour images and the graphs and tables of data in my reference books adn I am not sure they can.

Also I would want to be able to download my whole existing library at no additional cost.
It is the thing that made me move over to an MP3 player, that I could copy over all my existing music from all formats to the player. I doubt I could do that with my book library, yet.

Maybe one day an 'ebook' will come with a scanner that will read the book title and publisher and then automatically download the book at no charge.
There would need to be an electronic resource that contained every book ever published for that to happen though as well as a means to prove that I have already paid for the book once so will not be billed for downloading it.

Tap any book ISBN (barcode) (or cd or dvd barcode for that matter) into the Amazon search box and hey presto. Can the Kindle do this anybody?

 

[vikingcyclist]

Tap any book ISBN (barcode) (or cd or dvd barcode for that matter) into the Amazon search box and hey presto. Can the Kindle do this anybody?

Since it connects to the Amazon store in order to get books, yep. Of course you do still need to pay for those books.

 

[marinyork]

I don't see why for newly published books you shouldn't have access to a free e-book say when you're buying a hardback book at launch. Consumers don't like double dipping. These issues are by no means new for e-book and have occurred across the spectrum of media. I think that publishers take the biscuit with e-books as readers as a large varied group are a bit of a soft touch vs other groups on these same issues and seem to be much more respectful of publishers, writers and our archaic copyright laws that continually move the goal posts retrospectively.

 

[marinyork]

Tap any book ISBN (barcode) (or cd or dvd barcode for that matter) into the Amazon search box and hey presto. Can the Kindle do this anybody?

Amazon are somewhat naughty in this matter. It would be a formidable task putting all out of copyright books ever on their site (project gutenberg fails miserably) but amazon deliberately leave out popular titles that they'll then sell for a small sum and quite a few out of copyright history books that sell for very large sums of money in paper. Funny that.

 

[asterix]

Agreed.

Also it appears that the following may be true:

Amazon 'own' the books even if you buy them. There was a situation last year when Amazon illegally sold an eBook to it's customers. Rather than contacting the customers who had bought the book in good faith, Amazon simply deleted the book the next time the customer logged in. Leaving the customer to battle to get a refund

If so, then your library is at the mercy of Amazon whereas any book I have on a shelf is beyond their reach!

What's more, Kindle supports fewer formats than Sony's reader:

Also, many libraries are making ebooks available but not in a format that can be handled by Kindle.

local authorities that support free eBook lending. If you’re a member of one of the libraries on the list (there are 50 right now, including the London Libraries Consortium, which covers all London boroughs), all you need is your library PIN and card number, then you can browse and download the library’s eBook titles for free.

There are one or two catches, though. Books expire after two or three weeks, removing themselves from your reader in the process if all the library’s titles are ‘out’, so you’ll have to wait until they’re ‘returned’, and the number of titles we found in our local library was limited. But this is an avenue closed to Kindle owners completely; Amazon’s reader doesn’t support the Adobe DRM technology that allows books to be borrowed in this way.

Read more: Sony Reader Touch Edition PRS-650 review | Ebook Readers | Reviews | PC Pro http://www.pcpro.co....2#ixzz15LkQKwqU

 

[vikingcyclist]

Agreed.

Also it appears that the following may be true:

Half true, half false. There was no battle for people to get a refund, customers were simply provided a refund when the book was removed from sale.

If so, then your library is at the mercy of Amazon whereas any book I have on a shelf is beyond their reach!

This was my big issue with the Kindle, but then it's not too much of one. Any ebook I get from a source other than Amazon is just as much beyond their reach as one on my shelf. They're also only going to be using it to remove books which were sold illegally (what happened before was that the book was listed by a publisher who did not hold the rights), and refunds are automatic.

 

[threebikesmcginty]

I'm going to wait until there are second-hand Kindle shops or you can pick them up for 5p from a car boot sale.

 

[postman]

I have just donated four books to the charity shop.

One of them i bought last week .

So the money just goes round and around .

Don't think you could do that with the kindle

 

[threebikesmcginty]

They'll smell faintly of widdle. Almost all of them will be full of Jeffrey Archer books. And you'll invariably find a few hundred kilobytes are missing when you get two-thirds of the way through.

 

[marinyork]

Half true, half false. There was no battle for people to get a refund, customers were simply provided a refund when the book was removed from sale.

1984 and animal farm perfectly highlight some of the problems with e-books. Orwell died in 1950. Both books come out of copyright in this country in ten years even under our very restrictive copyright law. In the US with even bigger retrospective moving goal posts on copyright law they won't be out of copyright for a very long time. Not only is the publisher being extremely greedy in the prices it charges for it in electronic format but it's pretty ironic given the subject content and maybe Orwell would not have been amused by huge publishers pulling strings on legislation that was written a long time after his death.

 

[brokenbetty]

The beautiful irony of the remote deletion debacle was the books involved: 1984 and Animal Farm.

And that's the real concern - you might be happy to allow Amazon to remove illegal books when "illegal" is a copyright mixup, but what happens when, say, a book sold and bought in good faith is withdrawn three years later due to a successful libel action? Or the US bans the Koran and the UK doesn't?

 

[brokenbetty]

The beautiful irony of the remote deletion debacle was the books involved: 1984 and Animal Farm.

And that's the real concern - you might be happy to allow Amazon to remove illegal books when "illegal" is a copyright mixup, but what happens when, say, a book sold and bought in good faith is withdrawn three years later due to a successful libel action? Or the US bans the Koran and the UK doesn't?