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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.

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.

Would you take your computer to the beach?

Right tool for the job I say. A kindle paperwhite fits in cargo pocket shorts, doesn’t mind a little sand and is perfectly readable in full sun, even if you are wearing polarized glasses.

The only device I have not found a purpose for are general use tablets, I have another device that does what ever function better.

Dear PieterCasparzen,

The article devoted itself to the devices used and sold to read books, only.

I retorted in kind. An electronic device to read digitized print is by no means a BOOK! They have a shelf life of a battery, in that the market moves onto the next ‘reading gadget’, leaving you and your device in the dust, in the time for an AA battery, these days, to lose power.

I don’t care about your ipad. I won’t spend the money on one. I am a retired journalist of the printed word, and a published short story writer, first draft in ink. I was first published in 1964.

(*) Yes, my question was a serious one. Books cannot discharge their nonexistent electrical supply; fall, break and shatter the life of the human from whose hands it slipped, and memories gone; books cannot be superceded - ask any Christian, Jew, or insane Mohammedan, but not a Jehovah’s Witness - in their confusion, they thought it better to write their own, therefore fallable.

Good night!

I was doing fine without a (*) smartphone, until the phone company dropped the sort of signal I was using to communicateErgo, that was my ‘battery life experience’.