[Mad Dawgg]

I would be lost without my Palm M515! Once I got it my book buying habits changed forever!

I live in an area where there are no bookstores! NONE! It is like a living hell because for me to get really good books I must either buy from Amazon and wait for my stuff or drive 90 minutes plus to get to a decent bookstore.

Now I can go online and have my stuff in minutes and alot of it FREE! Stuff like "The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire." Always wanted it but it was usually over 70 dollars, but now I have the entire thing for nothing! Same goes for all of the works of the Bard and Poe and Plato and on and on!

What is even better is alot of the authors are figuring out that they can go direct to the public without some New York Publisher's permission! I've found some really good scifi that would've never seen the light of day if it had to go the route of traditional paper publishing!

Word to the wise though on buying an ebook platform! Make sure it has a color screen and has good illumination. Monochrome readers are just not as good as the color and some are downright unreadable.

My Color Palm is wonderful! It can store over 30 books as well as games and some great organizing software! I never leave the house without my palm and my wife loves it because now I can read in bed with the lights off!

Another nice thing about Palms and ebooks is you can read on you computer as well. You get eletronic bookmarks and annotation features and alot of the techinical books use hypertext for important terms and definitions!

Since I've got my Palm I've downloaded and/or purchased over 100 books, while only buying about 6 regular books in the same time period.

E-books for me are a must and I can't wait till the Library figures out how to get involved!

[discostu]

The future of e-books lies with a format that's at least as easy on the eyes as paper. All of the current screen technology used is more tiring that paper, once they get something figured out that's even or better THEN e-books will take off, but not one minute before.

[ZeonZaku]

I think it is publishing companies that are putting the brakes on e-books. Just look at all the problems with music companies and MP3s. I love e-books; I have many including the coveted LOTR trilogy. However I see another user’s verses RIAA situation.

[UB355]

DOA

[treadstone71]

I've had the exact opposite experience with color and B&W screens. I have an iPaq 3100 (B&W) and 3600 (color), and much prefer the 3100 for reading ebooks. Maybe the newer screens are better, but for now, it's black and white for me.

The big problem I see with ebooks catching on is that, with few exceptions, the price is the same as the hardcover edition. If I'm going to pay 25-30 dollars for a book, I'll just get the hardcover. That's why I've done most of my ebook buying with Baen Books. For under 20 dollars, I can get 4 to 5 unlocked ebooks in my choice of formats.

[bayourod]

If the eBooks industry really wanted to jump start sales all they would have to do is buy the exclusive rights to the next Harry Potter book.

[Age of Reason]

I love the smell of real books--new or used.

And I avoid buying softcovers.

The best thing about e-text, however, is the ability to search-out phrases and words.

I would love to see every hardcover book with a pocket on inside the cover, containing a CD of the entire text of the book.

Better would be to have the entire text of the book on some kind of plastic card instead of a bulky CD--one would then swipe the plastic card through a reader connected to your PC to upload the contents to you hard disc for future reference.

(Or perhaps the cover itself could have the e-text embedded in a magnetic layer of some sort: One would then move a wand over the book to upload the text. Simpler than a card or CD, which likely would be lost or separated from the book should it ever appear in a used bookshop)

I have never been able to find in which book it was that I read the quote that runs something like this: "Have we now sunk to such a level that it has become the first duty of an intelligent man to restate the obvious?"

Was it H.G. Wells who said that?

(Come to think of it, time to search the web again for that quote--maybe I can find it there; last time I tried was a few years back, and it didn't turn up.)

Anyway, the best use of technology would be to BRING DOWN THE COST OF HARDCOVER BOOKS!

It's insane what new ones cost--and a real indication of the loss of prosperity that one of the best things in life is costs so much.

One would think they were still written by hand.

[Snuffington]

To me, the best near-future commercial possibility doesn't lie with e-books. It lies with publishing-on-demand.

That's the notion where you don't print a book until it's sold. As a publisher, you wouldn't need to carry any inventory, yet your catalogue of offerings will include every title you ever published. As technology improves, the publisher is no more than a copyright title holder and royalty distributor. All the printing and distribution could be done at the retail level.

As others have pointed out, the problem with e-books is the same problem with all other digital content distribution models. While this is still shaking itself out in terms of technology and law, I can't see it attracting serious investment. Too risky.

[MineralMan]

I've had a couple of e-book readers around the office, and hated them all. Until they come up with one that is as easy to hold as a paperback book, as easy to read as print on paper, and that doesn't need battery power, I'll keep buying paper books.

[Physicist]

I read the Project Gutenberg version of Middlemarch on a Palm Pilot. The only problem was that it cost me as much in batteries as it would have to buy the book new.

That said, I am a great believer in electronic texts. I spend a fair amount of time volunteering for Project Gutenberg via Distributed Proofreaders.

[RightWingAtheist]

I will NEVER give up on traditional books. I was an "early reader," who was reading on a kindergarten level when I was three, and on the high school level when I was seven, and books are something I hold too dear to ever forsake for something else. I worked at a library for nearly eight years, and when I moved to the States, I had to leave my prized paperback collection behind with my parents. Fortunately, there are TWO used bookstores where I live (in Minneapolis's Dinkytown district), so I'm not going hungry.