Megatheriums for Breakfast

After spending quite some time over the last weeks in looking at e-readers, and doing a lot of talking about digital publishing in general, I thought it would be amusing and relevant to reprint this article I originally wrote nearly 20 years ago, talking about my love for hardcopy books and the problems it caused me. Particularly interesting (and in the event, quite wrong) are my speculations about the likelihood of electronic books. Read more…

Just as I’d finished my survey of nine different e-reader apps for the iPad, here comes Amazon with another e-reader – the Kindle Cloud Reader.

Apple has recently been cracking down on iPhone and iPad apps selling content.  Basically, Apple wants a 30% cut of any revenue made through in-app purchases, a figure so high as to wipe out all of the profits of companies who are retailing such content, such as e-book retailers.  If they refuse to pay Apple that cut, Apple forces those retailers to remove, not only any mechanism for in-app purchases, not only any link to a web site where such purchases could be made, but even any mention of such a web site.  Personally, I think this is totally unreasonable. Read more…

Summary and Conclusions

It’s been quite exhausting looking at and writing about these nine e-reader applications, but now I’m ready to draw my thoughts together. I think my major conclusion is that there is no one perfect e-reader app, and further, that the best e-reader to use depends on what you are reading.

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