That, BTW, is why migraine-inducing eInk readers are such failures with me. The "flash" of page cleanup was torture.
]]>Darn straight. Even the best dedicated reader has two drawbacks. First, it's literally just another damned electronic gadget to carry around (with an awkward form factor). Second, reader providers (yes I include the Abomination That Is Kindle) want to lock you to their gadget with DRM. So buy a Kindle edition for your PC/Netbook(e.g. Merchant Princes 1-3, 5,6), and somebody who doesn't know gives you a Nook for your birthday?
What got me into reading eBooks was nothing more or less than the ability to stuff them into my Palm(5 ounces), and carry around ONE gadget to deal with my eBooks(equivalent, at times, twenty pounds of paper) and my schedule, to-do list, checklists and pretty much the whole of my personal information management.
]]>Until the publishers started playing games recently with pricing and availability (and my Fictionwise pre-order of the eighth book in a series got canceled without my consent), I'd rather gotten into the habit of, if I was interested in an e-book that was part of a series, having a look at the description, and then buying it only if the rest of the series was available and getting them at the same time.
This is not as big a gamble as it seems. A series lives only if the first and subsequent books sell well enough to continue it, and any series with more than two-three entries comes self-recommended. As a result, I've frequently spent fifty or sixty dollars assembling series books for my collection, and getting around to reading them when I have time.
Specific examples include my (all bought at same time) sets of Casey Daniels' "Pepper Martin"), Carrie Vaughn's "Kitty", Preston and Child's "Pendergast", (I'd already read "Relic" and "Reliquary" as treeware, so when all the books showed up as electrons...), Rachel Caine's "Weather Warden", and Mario Acevedo's "Felix Gomez". These are just the examples that come readily to mind, I'm certain there are others.
]]>That's not a trivial point, and it's one reason why many people prefer paper over eInk. It's just one heckuva lot more comfortable, and I say that after one eInk-induced migraine from the first reader I tried that wasn't my trusty PalmPilot.
My own preferences for electronic books, by the way, have become: eReader for fiction, so I can turn it into text plus italics, the way I have for years, and for tutorial materials (e.g. Learning Python), DRM-free ePub on my copy of Firefox, since PDF does not play well with changes in monitor size/arrangement.
But I have always considered DRM as an abomination unto Cthulhu, and it's noteworthy that the publisher who got me into going all-eBook, all the time, was Baen(webscriptions), which has never used it. In fact, DRM-free eBooks got me back into reading and buying (electronic) books again after a five-year hiatus where I rarely bought anything. For the record, my Fictionwise account shows over three thousand novels, magazines (I subscribe electronically to Analog, Asimov's and F&SF.) and short stories. That comes to an average of about three hundred items a year, and by now most of them are novels.
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