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B&N Nook Tablet vs. Amazon Kindle Fire
DeviceGuru writes with this excerpt: "Barnes & Noble is expected to announce a 7-inch color tablet on November 7th, positioning it head-to-head with Amazon's recently announced Kindle Fire. B&N's Nook Tablet is rumored to have a slightly faster processor, twice the RAM and flash, and a $50 price premium relative to Amazon's tablet, among other differences. The quick-reference table in this article compares key features and specs of the two 7-inch Android tablets, based on a combination of leaked data published at Engadget.com plus some additional data from B&N's existing Nook Color specs, which seems to have much in common with this new, higher-end Nook model."
I've been following the announcements of the Kindle Fire and I'm sort of wondering if Amazon is abandoning what was so good about the platform, namely electronic ink. One has always been able to read a book off the LCD screen of one's smartphone or notebook, but the Kindle was a pleasurable experience because e-ink really is easier on the eyes. If the Kindle is going LCD, then it's just like any other tablet out there.
Why the fuck are e-books so expensive? Many of them are just slightly less than the actual book! Why the hell am I going to spend almost as much money buying the e-book, but not actually get anything physical out of the deal?
It was one thing when it came to buying digital music. You could spend $1 to get the song that you wanted, rather than paying $25 to get a CD with the song that you wanted. That's a big enough price difference to make it worthwhile. But with e-books, it's just stupid to spend $15 on a e-book, while the actual book is only $17.
There's no excuse for e-book prices to be that high. While authors and editors do deserve to get paid, e-books reduce the manufacturing and distribution costs to almost nothing. I just don't buy that the $2 more spent on a real book will cover the costs of harvesting of the trees used to make the paper, the manufacturing of the paper itself, the shipping of the massive paper rolls to the publisher, the cost and setup of the publishing equipment, the ink used to print the book, the typesetting, the creation of the cover art, the printing of the cover (especially for hardcover books), the cutting of the paper, the binding of the book, the packing of the finished books, the shipping to the publisher's and/or distributor's warehouses, the storage costs at these warehouses, the shipping to the individual bookstores, and the salaries of the many people involved with all of this.
I will not buy an e-book as long as it's clear that I'm getting blatantly ripped off.