walter said:
At the end of the day, it is not relevant which type of reader will prevail, as long as people do read books.
what's so important about reading books? considering that most books being published these days are garbage, there's no magic there. better to read an intelligent blog than a stupid book.
I don't get why there such a flamewar about it here.
the "flamewar" is because some people refuse to be civil. if the argument doesn't go just the way that they want it to, they'd rather upset the applecart than continue in good faith. the crux of the disagreement, however, is quite simple... some people wanted a _dedicated_ book-reading device, because "that's all i need". other people argued that "dedicated" devices nearly always yield in the long-run to generalized devices that equal the dedicated device in its own arena and surpass it in others... so that was the split -- dedicated machine or generalized? and indeed, one can see this split in the current situation... the kindle is the _dedicated_ book-reading device. the iphone is the generalized machine. and this difference in the _purpose_ results in ramifications. if you're building a dedicated book-reader, you'll use e-ink. if you're building a general-purpose machine, you go l.c.d. however, with mary lou's pixel qi screen, perhaps we see the path that we can take to make everyone happy now... part of the reason for the disagreement was that the people who were arguing for the dedicated-machine had the idea that such a machine would be _less_expensive_. remember how david rothman _insisted_ for _years_ that a machine would be manufactured that cost end-users a mere $50... i always said this idea was ridiculous, because a reader has to have a screen and a chip and an operating system, and those are the most expensive parts of any computer, so if you're going to pay for those for a dedicated reader, you might as well get a full-fledged computer instead... and yes indeed, when the reader-machines _did_ come out, like the kindle, and the iliad, they were definitely not cheap. you paid about $600 for your iliad, didn't you? _not_cheap._ but, you know, when you call someone's opinion "ridiculous", they take offense -- even when it is! -- and, boom!, flamewar. -bowerbird ************** Recession-proof vacation ideas. Find free things to do in the U.S. (http://travel.aol.com/travel-ideas/domestic/national-tourism-week?ncid=emlcn...)