ok, so i did the "i told you so" post about roger frank. 1. and i did the "i told you so" post about light markup. 2. which means there's just one more post in this year-end trifecta of "i told you so", with the culmination this month of a 5-year bet back in '05 with the teleread idiot rothman about e-book hardware development from 2005 to 2010... basically, rothman had predicted a $50 e-book-machine, -- wrong! -- and i said it won't happen for 5 years, if then, and that if it did, i'd buy him a tofu turkey for thanksgiving. if you'd like to refresh yourself on the original exchange and my revisitation to the post at the one-year mark, see:

http://www.teleread.com/2005/11/29/you-can-buy-the-mit-100-laptop-for-200/ the teleread post was november 29th of 2005, so i will make my 5th anniversary posting (haven't missed a year!) that day, as my final entry in that series, as i nailed things conclusively. the bottom line is that rothman lost the bet. completely! there is no $50 e-book reader-machine at all, let alone in sufficiently high volume to produce such a low price... you might pick up an off-brand unit on black friday for $99, or for $69. but no guarantee even of that, we'll have to see. and even if so, don't you forget that 2010 was _my_ guess... rothman had the cheap machines arriving _much_earlier_... indeed, he's had $50 machines as "right around the corner" for about a decade now; it was just downright embarrassing. meanwhile, there are all kinds of e-book-machines in stores this holiday season at the kinds of prices that we should have been expecting all along, realistic prices, which would not give "sticker-shock" because we had believed a cracked crystal ball. have a happy thanksgiving, folks! -bowerbird