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Why spend your hard-earned money, for a piece of technology, that has an active life, of an AA battery?

Is this a serious question? The answer is, because when I get on a 6 hour cross-country flight, I don't want to bring four books with me in a carry-on bag. I can pull out my iPad and I have my entire library available at the push of a button. And when I get tired of reading, I can surf the web, watch a movie, or play a game.

I say this as someone that prefers physical books to e-readers. But to say why would anyone every buy it? That's silly.

Why spend your hard-earned money, for a piece of technology, that has an active life, of an AA battery?

Is this a serious question? The answer is, because when I get on a 6 hour cross-country flight, I don't want to bring four books with me in a carry-on bag. I can pull out my iPad and I have my entire library available at the push of a button. And when I get tired of reading, I can surf the web, watch a movie, or play a game.

I say this as someone that prefers physical books to e-readers. But to say why would anyone every buy it? That's silly.

I can bring my dell netbook running centos, and have downloaded many gig of PDFs of books. It's a full PC, access to internet, usb peripherals, etc. I can write c++ code, compile, link executables. I can have mysql server running, can have an apache webserver running. Can email, work with openoffice powerpoints, excel spreadsheets, word docs. I can create PDFs. I can edit bitmap images. I can actually work with the thing. For a couple hundred bucks.

These little "reader" things like kindle are small, but full computers can be the same size.

The big difference with the "readers" is that they are specialized little pieces of cr@p that lock in users to what the vendor wants to lock them in to.

They're aimed at people who have the money to part with and don't care or understand that they are locked in to vendor schemes on those devices.

The traditional OS is the way to go, IMHO, well, until something better comes along.