The Glade 4.0

Never found much use for RSS or Twitter. I hate facebook, but I have found it useful on occaision to find old friends who I haven't seen in a long time.

Put me firmly in the Logitech mouse crowd, have owned several different ones of theirs now. Also, could never stand the ergonomic keyboards, they caused me much more pain than a standard one. Wireless input devices do have their uses, but I do prefer wired.

Craigslist is the greatest thing ever in my opinion. I love buying stuff at auctions, and reselling it. I was an early user of eBay, but they've jacked their fees up so high, it has become largely useless for anything other than extremely rare items, or buying cheap crap from China. Craigslist once again gives me the larger market I need. I have an app on my iphone now that searches several cities at once, greatest app evar!

The iPad. I have an iphone, and while I do like it, it is way too locked down and crippled for my taste, so why on earth would I want a less portable version of the same thing that can't even make phone calls? Don't get me wrong, I can see a lot of uses for a tablet like the iPad, just not with the same OS as an iPhone, probably not an Apple OS at all.

Kindle - this one hurts, I want a kindle, or similar, so badly, but I refuse to pay more for an ebook than for a hard copy. I also have a lot of friends who share books, and most of the time you can't share an ebook.

When has this been the case? I've never run across an ebook that was more than a hard copy of the tome, be it hardcover, paperback, or trade (well, once for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, but that was a mistake that was corrected the next day).

Once there is a Half Price Books for ebooks, then I'll investigate.

Things may have changed, if so, I maybe looking closer at getting one, espescially now that you can get one for $130, however, the last time I looked at them, several of the books I looked at were $9.99 when I could buy the paperback for $7.99 I just expect the ebooks to be much cheaper than that, since they can cut out a huge chunk of printing costs.

Is there a way yet to share an ebook, other than loaning someone your reader?

Barnes and Noble's nook has a beta program called LendMe. However, with the company itself up for sale, now, I have stopped outright recommending the nook lest I lure somebody into an unsure future of the product that turns out sour.

However, I hope that B&N and/or the nook sticks around long enough for LendMe to inspire competitors. Ideally, I'd love to see the nook survive whatever it takes to make B&N stable and healthy, so that my hardware and content don't become a dead end, and that B&N (or new parent company) do some iterations on LendMe to fix my one big glaring issue with it -- the stipulation that books may only be lent once.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

And only for two weeks.

Ah, that, too, though if I could lend once per friend for 2 weeks at a time, and either get unlimited lends (with the stipulation that I can't have it lent twice concurrently) or accrue, say, a lend per 2 months on each book, I'd still consider it solidly a win.

The two weeks is negotiable -- that's enough time to lend something for somebody to check it out even if they don't finish it. If they like it, they should be motivated to buy a copy, especially at e-book prices. Though, given the other stipulations (where you can't read a currently-lent book), my guess is that the only reason it exists is to make the idea of lending digitally seem safer to publishers in order to get their buy-in. If the program were successful, I think that the time restriction would be phased out or eased, but by no means shortened, so I'm not concerned.

_________________
"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Facebook, Twitter, RSS, generally ambivalent about my hardware, so long as it works. I now am using an ancient MS Intellimouse that works very well; before that, I had a very nice, wireless Logitech mouse that had an actual ball, rather than optical. I loved that mouse, but I screwed it up in an embarrassing way.

Heck, I don't get cars, for the most part. A necessary evil, though, today ... much like computers!

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This cold and dark tormented hell
Is all I`ll ever know
So when you get to heaven
May the devil be the judge

You must live in an area with plenty of public transport. Where I live, cars aren't an option.

What I'd really like to see on the book loaning thing, would be like an online library, where all your purchased ebooks is stored. Any time you want to read one, you simply connect to your own library and download it. If you want to lend it, you email someone a link to it, and they can download it, however you can no longer read it till you get it back from them. No limits on how many times you can lend it or for how long, heck, you can let them keep it forever if you want, but they can never lend it to anyone else. If you wanted a book back, then you could recall it at any time, and the next time the person who had it signed online, they would lose access to the book. Another way to extend this, and possibly make it more interesting to the industry, would be through transfer of ownership. I for one have bought a lot of books at yardsales, used book stores, etc. You could allow the original owner to sell his e-copy, at a somewhat reduced price, much like a yardsale, except part of the proceeds could go back to the industry, something that doesn't happen with hard copies, and the rest could possibly be given as credit so the seller uses it to purchase new books.

I realize with any digital format there is a much higher likelyhood of piracy, but I don't see it being that big a problem. One of the biggest driving factors of piracy when it comes to audio and video is the retail prices, espescially in the music business. If the price of ebooks is at least as low or lower than a paperback, there isn't as much incentive to pirate it. I just don't see the reading culture supporting piracy as much either.

I don't buy books, unless they are hardcover, on sale extremely cheap, and will look nice on my library bookshelves (in addition to being somewhat interesting.) Instead, I keep a membership to that terrible, evil enemy of capitalism, creativity and copyright, the municipal Public Library. Since I don't see digital free libraries being out there anytime soon...because obviously it's far worse to be able to get books off the Internet for free...wait a minute...why is that?

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
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This is roughly how LendMe works, although you don't have to download your book every time you want to read it -- you can keep it local to your nook, and the act of lending it simply locks the book out for the duration of the loan. I like the notion of e-sale with the publisher getting a bit of secondary revenue, too.

_________________
"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades