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Death of Printed Books May Have Been Exaggerated
New submitter razor88x writes "Although just 16% of Americans have purchased an e-book to date, the growth rate in sales of digital books is already dropping sharply. At the same time, sales of dedicated e-readers actually shrank in 2012, as people bought tablets instead. Meanwhile, printed books continue to be preferred over e-books by a wide majority of U.S. book readers. In his blog post Will Gutenberg Laugh Last?, writer Nicholas Carr draws on these statistics and others to argue that, contrary to predictions, printed books may continue to be the book's dominant form. 'We may be discovering,' he writes, 'that e-books are well suited to some types of books (like genre fiction) but not well suited to other types (like nonfiction and literary fiction) and are well suited to certain reading situations (plane trips) but less well suited to others (lying on the couch at home). The e-book may turn out to be more a complement to the printed book, as audiobooks have long been, rather than an outright substitute.'"
If it's something unwieldy or I know I'll be flipping back and forth between pages, or need to see multiple pages simultaneously, like Practical Electronics for Inventors, I'll buy the paper book. If it's a novel, or casual reading, I can go with e-book format. That said, I donated to a local library a lot of my old books: I hadn't read them in years, and most anything I need to know, now-a-days, I just Google for. For technical information, it's quicker to Google it than look it up in a book.
My wife does and quote "loves her nook" which was a simple touch, turned tablet
I got her simple touch, rooted it, and use it constantly for office documents, technical PDF's like mechanical drawings and other things such as email, news and weather
as someone who does not read for escapet, I love being able to drop a doc on a tablet and walk it around, she loves it cause its an entire bookstore AND local library, one click away that also lets her take a moment to check facebook, or play a round of scrabble, while listening to her music while between classes
sure the devices have taken a drop, most people are happy with ones they bought... most people now days are not stupid and buy the product they like instead of this weeks fad / toy, and as time marches on the difference between printed and ebook preference will shift
This only applies to the Amazon Kindle store, not to the Kindle hardware itself. Plug the thing in, and it's a USB Mass Storage device you can drag-and-drop DRM-free ebooks (in .mobi and a few other formats) perfectly fine.
Having just published an ebook, I can tell you that DRM is a choice made by the publisher. Amazon will happily sell ebooks without DRM, and are doing so with mine right now, I didn't check "provide copy protection".
What "printed version" of the Comedy are you referring to? There are myriad editions of Dante in English, some illustrated, most not, and there have been multiple sets of illustrations created for the text. If you are referring to Dore's illustrations, those tend to accompany translations like Longfellow's that contemporary readers would best avoid -- they are antiquated, sometimes contain misunderstandings of Dante's 13th-century Italian, and they lack a facing-page Italian text. Ironically, because those translations tend to lack a commentary, were it not for the illustrations they would actually be more readable on the Kindle and similar devices than modern editions where one would refer to endnotes.
I would say that the best all-around translation of the Comedy into contemporary English is Allen Mandelbaum's. That one does happen to contain illustrations, by Barry Moser, but they are not especially important and someone reading the text without them would miss nothing.
But what professional-quality ebooks are lawfully distributed DRM-free?
There quite a few publishers with "DRM free only" e-books. For example:
http://www.manning.com/
http://oreilly.com/
http://www.linuxjournal.com/
Encourage them if you do not like DRMed books.
Some more:
http://nostarch.com/
http://pragprog.com/
https://www.baenebooks.com/t-drm.aspx
http://www.dragonmount.com/index.php/News/book-news/new-drm-free-ebook-store-r401
http://lifehacker.com/5946956/grab-a-bundle-of-drm+free-ebooks-on-the-cheap