According to a New York Times article, Amazon is apparently breaking into the E-Reader market, whatever that market might be. So far, E-Readers have not taken off.
Amazon also intends to make their e-books proprietary - only accessible with Amazon's particular E-Reader. Personally, I think that's a rather stupid marketing decision. Cross-platform usability is a much better idea, and hopefully Amazon will realize that soon.
Also mentioned is that Google is going to start charging users for access to the books under copyright on Google Book Search. While this is a logical next step for Google, I feel rather irritated. I just know students will use that and pay for access to these books, when they could use the library and get the books through the OhioLINK catalog for free in 2-3 business days. Sigh. We already try to warn students against paying for articles they find through Google (the library offers so many of those for free electronically), and now here's another one to counter. Fun.
2 comments:
What self-respecting college student pays for ANYTHING they could get for free? Half of my effort expended in college was trying to figure out how to get my hands on all the free food possible--there's no way in hell I'd pay to download books I could be getting for free. Hell, I didn't even like paying 10 cents a page to print or copy stuff from the library--I'd take notes on it there and then return it to the shelf!
While I agree with you - I tried to avoid paying for anything - not all students plan ahead enough to get this stuff. In all likelihood, most don't pay for stuff, they just find the free stuff of sketchy quality. But I am sure there are students who do pay for this stuff.
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