darcybaston

falves

tank4141

Sure, there's a cost involved in the digital distribution, and the people involved in the distribution deserve their fair share and profit. And people like editors deserve money for their tedious work (Ann Rice wrote a couple of books without an editor 'interfering' and oh man was it painfully obvious). But the way I see it, a digital book should be one buck to the writer, one buck to the editing staff, and one buck to the store that sells it. Not seventy cents to the writer, thirty cents to the editing staff, and six bucks to the store that sells it.

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dandyrandy

I think you're missing the point in the pricing scheme. While it's perfectly acceptable and there is a subculture that almost exclusively shops used, the content of the novel, not the format that the novel is delivered in, is what drives it's retail price.

Digital music is the exact same way. An album on iTunes is the same price (basically) as a CD at Circuit City. The only difference between music and books is with iTunes you can download selected parts of the album, whereas you probably wouldn't want to only download chapters 6, 9, and 13 of a novel.

I sincerely feel that if the media format is agreeable, which Sony's eBook Reader seems to be, then it should be perfectly acceptable to consider paying around mass-market paperback price to download a novel and be able to keep it "forever" digitally.

I do feel that Sony would have much more success with this device if the hardware was sold as a loss leader to drive more sales of the books in the Connect store, of which Sony would take a cut.

SDBryan

The entire e-book thing has yet to work because people are vastly overcharging for them. Who in their right mind pays seven bucks to download a novel when they can wander into the nearest used book store and buy it for three? Project Gutenberg is the only worthwhile reason to be interested in e-books nowadays, and until the publishing companies get less greedy that's how it's going to stay.

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middy

BrianB

BrianB

ki_cz

greypoet

Without porn, this thing is going nowhere.

pyramid6

/pun unintended

Tank

ultim8fury

Erzengel

Add on top of that, the fact that there is no flicker, etc involved since the image is static while reading, and this becomes much much easier to read that any kind of electronic display we had 10 years ago.

I think $350 is certainly resonable. I myself have been waiting on something like this for a very long time. The only thing I would like to have is some sort of inherient lighting for reading in a dark environment, but then again, none of my real books have that either.

jgoforth

Sarcasm aside, this fulfills a very different need and niche market than a typical PDA. This is geared toward long battery life and massive storage (given the thin requirements of the target medium) document reading.

Given the number of hours I've put on my PDA performing exactly this function, I'm well within this market - but not this cost. I'll probably let Sony pave the way and purchase a lower cost competitor in 2-3 years.

Keighvin

Sarcasm aside, this is targetted toward an entirely different niche in a fairly new market: low power consumption and massive storage (at least, given the thin requirements) document reader.

Given the number of hours I've put my PDA through to fulfill this function, this is actually attractive to me. However, not at this cost; I'll let Sony pave the way and then snatch up a cheap competitor in 2-3 years.

Keighvin

BUT...

$350 is too much for ten-year old (Newton, basically) technology.

Sean Harrington