Wednesday, September 27, 2006

eBook readers

Sony has finally released their eBook reader into the US market. Electronic paper, anyone? Read about it and an alternative at MetaFilter.

Although a bit dated (2001), simply the best article about the important legal and cultural issues related to eBooks is Clifford Lynch's The Battle to Define the Future of the Book in the Digital World.

3 comments:

Alec said...

A rather celebratory review article is here.

Anonymous said...

Until a month ago I was skeptical of ebooks because they were almost all proprietary. I only used Project Gutenberg for the “big hits” of literature and philosophy because I rarely found the obscure titles that I wanted. However, now that google has made downloadable PDFs of innumerable obscure works in the public domain, I think that ebooks may catch on in a big way. I will probably buy one of these readers, but I might wait until the next generation of them.

Travis Nygard
Until a month ago I was skeptical of ebooks because they were almost all proprietary. I only used Project Gutenberg for the “big hits” of literature and philosophy because I rarely found the obscure titles that I wanted. However, now that google has made downloadable PDFs of innumerable obscure works in the public domain, I think that ebooks may catch on in a big way. I will probably buy one of these readers, but I might wait until the next generation of them.

Travis Nygard

Alec said...

Excellent point, Travis! I, too, am considering a purchase, and I had forgotten this extra benefit.