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Barnes and Noble Drops Ebooks

Posted by michael on from the one-step-forward-two-steps-back dept.

computx writes "I just recieved an email from Barnes and Noble that they will no longer sell ebooks and I have 1 month to download the books I have purchased. Wow!"

2 of 411 comments (clear)

  1. Inconvenient at best by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I recall my one experience purchasing ebooks. It seemed like a fantastic idea. I saved on shipping, and would get it right away.

    The DRM management in both the Microsoft and Adobe Readers made it so annoying that it took days for me to be able to read what I purchased. A combination of buggy software and lousy online support ended my enthusiasm. In the end, I decided to go back to good, old-fashioned books.

  2. Re:Bathroom Reading by Zathrus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I know some people that talk about the allure of paper, and the sentimentality they have for holding a book with paper, but personally if I could buy eBooks and download them into a nice sized reader that had acceptable battery life and a nice, easy to read screen

    The "nice, easy to read screen" cannot be emphasized enough.

    Most portable electronics have tiny screens with low resolutions, horrible DPI, and glare issues. And they suck down batteries.

    Newspaper print is generally the worst in terms of DPI for printed material, and even it exceeds 2400 DPI. I distinctly recall talking to a friend of my father who was in the newspaper business. He was wondering when I thought traditional printed newspapers would be in significant danger from portable devices, home printing, etc. I, as a know-it-all geeky CS student, said it'd probably be about 10 years before the display technologies got there.

    Well, it's roughly 10 years later and we're really no closer than we were. Printing has certainly improved, but not as dramatically as I expected. Display technologies have gone more or less nowhere -- LCD has come down in price and power consumption, but the resolutions haven't gone up dramatically and there's been no really new technologies in that time period. Sure, OLED and similar are on the horizon now, but they don't promise a solution to the resolution issues. Printed circuits, electronic paper, and other technologies are also closer, but still probably a decade or more away.

    Paper is here to stay for quite some time.