
Amazon's Working on Kindle Reader Software for Mac, Too - alexandros
http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/chris-dannen/techwatch/when-will-kindle-become-open
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stse
Regarding evolution of the e-reader, I think course literature is going to be
the "killer market". I've attended courses where half of the class couldn't
even get all the books. Required reading is also often a fraction of the books
content. Sometimes one book is more expensive then all the other books
combined and you can't really make notes in them if you want to sell them
later. If you miss a class session you always have to find out if there were
any changes or notes handed out. To summarize, it's really a pain.

Imagine if you instead could loan/lease the books to your e-reader for the
duration of the course and only pay for the relevant pages. You could make
digital notes and share with your classmates and ask questions to your
teachers. By syncing the device you would always have the latest course
schedule and material. Some of this is doable without an e-reader, but there
always be a disconnect between the analog and digital information.

This might already exist or never be practically feasible. But when people
claim that 'people always prefer physical books', I don't agree. At least not
when it comes to course literature.

On a side note, anyone seeing Google selling OCR'ed books as e-books with an
android based e-reader? :)

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shpxnvz
_Imagine if you instead could loan/lease the books to your e-reader for the
duration of the course and only pay for the relevant pages._

I imagine that as soon as physical textbooks were out of availability the cost
of "only the relevant pages" would climb drastically. Without an active market
in used textbooks, and with DRM preventing any reselling of the content you
purchased, I have little doubt that the captive student market would be
exploited as hard and as often as possible.

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stse
The only real future for the publish industry that I see, with regard to
course literature, is if they either create an outstanding service themselves
or work together with the universities. I don't really see any drawback with
electronic books that won't solve itself by time.

The publishing industry faces some of the same challenges that the music
industry did when the mp3 players started to become available. And similar to
then people will start to think of books as data, and not psychical things.
They need to realize this and make the most of it themselves, and not make
litigation and DRM part of their business plan.

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shpxnvz
Look at what working with the universities did for student loans. American
educational institutions have proven themselves perfectly willing to screw
their students for a cut of the profits.

Sure, that would be great for the publishing industry, just as it is for the
student loan industry, but considering the cost to the student it doesn't seem
like the outcome to root for.

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jrockway
A web browser? Amazon's books are just HTML.

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ajju
with DRM.

Also, it's not really HTML. Amazon uses the .azw file format which is
basically a mobireader .prc with some extra drm on top

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jrockway
Right, but the DRM is one Python script away from being gone. It is like
saying DVDs have DRM; sure, they do, but it's so trivial to break that nobody
even notices anymore.

