It is a fact because it is a fact. Let me remind you of what a fact is. A fact is an alleged event or circumstance, separate from a legal effect or consequence; something said to be true or supposed to have happened. Therefore, your being pathetic is a fact, even though you appear to find it questionable.
I will now revise the fact that was previously stated and referenced, to state that you are ignorant and pathetic.
So if I buy one, but have two or more Kindles, I can read it on all of them?
Yes, you can. You just have to log out of one kindle and log in on another, and you have access to your entire library of purchased kindle books and documents on your personal server space.
Similiarly, you can indefinately lend a kindle book to a friend in Brazil, but only in the same example (log out on kindle 1, log in on kindle 2). Just like a dead tree book, if your friend in Brazil is reading it at the time, you can't.
No, you can't sell a kindle book to a used kindle bookstore. Obviously not, there is no difference between a new or used kindle book.
While you can't print out a chapter of a kindle book to take to read at the beach, you can do order of magnitude better. You can take your kindle to the beach, and read any book ever. If you haven't previously bought the book, you can buy and download any book, generally in under the time it would take for you to walk over to a snack vendor and buy something while at the beach. If you are short on money or don't like books, you can use the kindle to go online and read more craphound.com.
A reasonable consumer doesn't buy a kindle or books for it so that they can lend them to a friend or print copies. A reasonable consumer buys a kindle and kindle books specifically because they are user friendly, convenient, wider selection that most local bookstores (individually, if not in the aggregate), often cheaper than other legal sources, and allow you carry around as many books as you can afford without having to actually carry them around.
Personally, I find the e-ink screen easier to read than traditional books (which become harder to read due to fading, spills, text whose size/brightness/boldness can't be changed as my eyes turn older).
Meanwhile, you have doubts about the functionality of a product you have never used (or else you would not have such doubts) because you are worried about why the publishers don't want you having the ability to pirate. That is pathetic, and it makes you a pathetic person.
You can get it with free shipping and no tax from buy.com. A1books has it for 21.99 (didnt check the checkout price). It definately isnt close to $100.
The parents determine whether or not to hand the keys to the car over to the kid (unless, of course, the kid can pay for their own car, insurance, gas, maintenance, etc using just allowance). I don't go out of my way to tell parents how to raise their children. I simply treat children as citizens until they prove otherwise.
The privilege of driving a car, however, is not granted by the parents, but rather by the state, in the form of earning a driver's license.
Note that by the time Tyler is allowed to drive without restrictions from his state, he is likely 18 (except in some specific states, where its older than that), and thus should not be referred to as little.
The issue, of course, is that "little" Tyler needs to learn how to drive in a safe environment before he is personally responsible for everything that he does (and not his parents). The only conditions a parent should impose on their children for driving should be that the parents have personally witnessed the child driving safely in public. The rest will take care of itself through legal issues.
Speeding tickets, DUI, causing crashes (I don't care if its an accident, and neither does your insurance), etc. should be what keeps people off the road, and valid, up to date licenses are what grants the privilege of driving. Not parental consent.
Hate to point this out, but money spent on psychotic lawyers is actually better for a stock price than money spent on R&D.
Defense of a patent or trademark can be capitalized if successful, therefore, lawyer fees = asset.
R&D is money spent on the hope that something will become an asset, so its costs are expensed immediately.
There is no law against spending money on legal fees to pursue an option that may or may not result in success.
To sum up, there is no way that lawsuits whose sum legal costs are immaterial to the company have had any direct or indirect effect on stock prices (unless they win the lawsuit, in which case it probably helps).
As long as paper books exist, they will be more desirable to a specific segment of the market, specifically those who wish to resell their books. For those of us who like to keep our books, (mostly those of us who don't buy books unless we want to keep them), an electronic format is more convenient and provides a better selection. Therefore paper books will be more desireable based on lack of drm or ability to resell them because they already aren't.
On a much more important point than you calling me names that add no value to your point (there arent any shills or fanboys rushing to attack you, so dont call them out, and if you arent referring to me, then dont mention them, and if you are calling me names, then you should have spent 30 seconds reading my others posts on/. and noticed that it simply wouldnt be true. I just happen to disagree that drm is the only factor to look at when buying things.), you have an interesting contradiction within the same paragraph.
So you think that publisher's desire for control will kill the paper book market, but that consumer demand caused publishers to provide drm free music.
I don't know how you can state these two things. If you said them a year apart, I would still question it. But you said them in the same paragraph.
To be fair, if you actively choose to purchase a book with drm in electronic form over a paper version, you arent being repressed, whether or not you consider yourself to be part of the public. On the other hand, pirates generally aren't doing what they do for the public good either. They don't "got your back." They do it for notoriety (thats 'popularity' for the sake of being well known, rather than being well liked).
It is not an oppressive restriction to sell ebooks with drm. The solution to "I don't like drm" is not "pirate the book instead." Its "don't buy the book."
In other news, electronic versions of books do not prohibit you from going out and buying a dead tree version of a book. When the market for dead tree books is falling, and it can be shown that it is because of the existence of ebooks, then you might have a point. It still wouldn't be "pirate a book instead of buying it." It would be "buy it in a bookstore or a used bookstore or check it from the library or borrow it from someone else or do without."
Perhaps I did point out that electronic books contain additional costs. This point, however, is not a disincentive to purchase, for other reasons that I also highlighted.
I still hold that electronic distribution method of book sales, which have a method of resale restricted for valid purposes, are much more than just a fancy method of distribution for purpose of raising costs or that the added costs are a disincentive.
Cheaper is not the only function that goes into purchasing things.
On the one hand,I wouldn't have thrown out the argument already presented that happens to provide an incentive despite what you perceive to be a price difference for purchasing ebooks (ease of use, availability, recoverability in device failure [dead tree book vs ebook reade], and subscription services).
On the other hand, some of your sentence is wrong, while some of it is irrelevant.
To begin with, the wrong. You can, of course, sell your device. Just log out, have the person you sold it to set up their account, and suddenly, they don't have access to your books anymore. Or sell them your library and don't log out, and cancel your credit card so they have to change the user information to buy new stuff. Meanwhile, you can use a proprietary reader or a cell phone reader or a reader on your computer (I assume one of those two is how you posted on/., so you either self tether yourself to the device or you aren't tethered to it).
To be fair, you can loan your ebooks to others, but just like with a dead tree book, you can't have access at the time. Either let them borrow your device, or log out of your device and have them log in as you on theirs. Voila, they can read your entire library.
Now for the points of relevance. Believe it or not, there is a difference between paperback and electronic form. If you sell a paperback book, the publisher has no requirement to keep track of this fact. If you sell an ebook, they have to unregister the sale from you and re-register the sale to someone else. They then have to transfer the ebook to a device for a new person. This of course, means they would have to treat this as a sale, without collecting money, which means they would have to pay royalties. Note that this is true even if you give a book away. Most royalties agreements are based on a combination of percentage of sales and number of copies sold. Since royalies are paid upon sale, they aren't going to get credit for the transfer. The only reason this isn't done with dead tree books is because it isn't possible.
To recap, there is a large incentive to buy ebooks, which is reflected in the difference in price between them and dead tree books. To claim that you specifically are immune to this incentive is a lie. If you want to say that the incentive doesn't break your threshold for purchase, I'm not going to be able to convince you, but no retailer is going to care about your niche, irrelevant complaints.
You feel like you are being lied to for 2 reasons: 1) You went into the conversation looking to be lied to, so you found a reason to believe it. 2) You don't understand the difference between paperback and electronic books.
While I am going to go ahead and ignore the fact that you chose one price point from one website for one book for one currency exchange rate at one point in time and then tried to claim that prices in a different medium for all products at all times in all currencies must also be the similiar (Ok, I didn't ignore it, but what are you being lied to about if I'm not spot on, what are you being lied to about?), I will briefly explain why this is irrelevant (without approaching those issues).
While I am simplifying here,
The costs for a paperback book include obtaining the copyight, printing the books, point of sale costs (either website or cashier in a physical store), and royalties on sales. If the book doesn't sell well, you may have warehousing costs, but these are sold through websites or to bookstores that do sell a lot and need JIT inventory, which actually lowers your cost of goods sold.
The copyright, royalties, and POS costs (if website) are relatively fixed. The POS costs and printing costs are negligible due to volume. Therefore, a book that costs $4 to sell, even if stored for 50 years, is not going to go up in cost. Of course, after a long period of time, you just make a new edition, and people buy an old book again.
Electronic books, on the other hand, have additional costs. Since you arent printing a specific number of books, but rather you are keeping a master copy on a server that needs encryption and protection against non-sales, the cost of having one book for sale could be higher. You still have to obtain the copyright, pay royalties on sales, etc. Now you also have the cost of setting up user accounts so that when John Smith buys a book, he doesn't have to keep his downloaded book on his proprietary reader. He can keep it on his user account and redownload whenever he wants to read it. This would be negligible except that you are paying a per sold reading device, along with a per book sold fee for the network bandwidth. This is cheaper in the long run because some users buy the reader, then don't buy a lot of books.
Users, on the hand, find the value of an ebook reader beyond that of a paperback. If I buy 10000 books (not all at once, that would be silly) for my ebook reader, and it dies, I can get a new ebook reader and read all of my books within an hour (depending on traffic). If my house burns down, I cannot replace my books. The same editions are not necessarily available, I probably don't remember all of them, and I gurantee you I don't have $100000 lying around just to repurchase books. Then again, maybe I'm on the subway or at the airport or in the car on a roadtrip or at the hotel on a business trip or on vacation or standing in line at the post office or waiting in the parking lot to pick up my kids from school or just woke up the morning after and its awkward and I need a distraction or its cheaper because the book is brand new or my car is low on gas and I don't want to leave the house cause its raining and theres nothing on tv or [you really read all these examples, didn't you] and thus a bookstore is out of question because I want to read a new book immediately. Believe it or not, I'm willing to pay a premium for that and so are most people. In addition to immediate access to a book, you get access to far, far more titles than all of the bookstores in your city might carry. With the kindle,you get magazines and newspapers too.
Of course, to give users this useability, there are higher costs. Since the Kindle is based on a US service provider, international costs are quite reasonably higher. Since this is a servcie, and not just a book, it is possible that VAT bumps the higher cost even higher. I'm not going to bother to try to explain currency exchange to you, but suffice it say that people like books to cost them the same regardless of when they buy it, since age isnt a factor for ebooks, but exchange rates do change and the possibility of the dollar weakening is factored into the price.
Back in college, I worked in a restaurant where initially we played the radio in the kitchen for employees during slow hours. At some point, we received a warning letter, so we got rid of the radio, which only employees could hear, and replaced it with a speaker system that played throughout the restaurant. We then changed the policy so that only cds brought in by employees could be played over the speakers. As far as I know (havent worked there in 3 years), they still don't pay anything for doing so.
Actually, if you were able to offer zero cents, then buying the game would make no difference to your finances.
If you saved 1 cent from 1000 publishers (assuming you are just buying world of goo), you would have spent 19990 instead of 20000, but you still would have 20 grand lying around, and probably wouldn't bother arguing the difference between a zero cent and a one cent game.
I would assume that to be B&N's issue, not yours. Unless of course the ability to pirate things causes you to no longer wish to purchase. That would be like not buying an mp3 player because it will play music that wasn't purchased from amazon or itunes.
I have had my kindle fall out of my car, dropped it down a flight of stairs, and spilled wine on it. It has no problems. How could you possibly have broken it by sitting on it in a soft bed? Did you take a running start and knock it out of a 3 story window?
Its more like going to whole foods vs publix vs kroger vs (local businessman) and buying a 2 liter of coke in the new family style bottle.
At whole foods, its $9. At publix, its $3. At kroger, its $5, but you have to have a kroger credit card to buy it, but if you have bought a 2 liter of coke before, since its in new packaging, you can get a second copy for a friend who also has an account but hasn't bought it before. The local businessman charges 2.50, but he is sold out and wont be getting more in for a while due to high return rates.
I'll say BOOOOOO to this. The DS is the last system where developers don't have the bias that 2D is somehow out of style and will actually put significant resources behind a 2D game,
Books are not a substitute for cable television. You also heavily overestimate the cost of both books and cable television. If you can only choose one for informational needs, you choose television, hands down. News, oddly enough (not the crap on CNN) doesn't tend to age well. If I want to learn that Barack Obama won a nobel peace prize for doing nothing, I'm not going to read about it in a book. If I want to find out how my investments are doing, I'm not going to find that in a book either. If I want to learn organic chemistry, I'm going to learn about it in a lab, not in a book. If I want to learn computer science, I'm also not going to use a book. If I want to learn grammar, maybe I'll use a book. It could be more efficient than an english course, which tends not to focus on books. On that note, based on your grammar, you must have been watching a ton of science/history/discovery channels.
While books tend to age well, what you really pay for with tv is up to the minute news, live sports, and occassional escapes from reality. Sure, if all you use tv for is to watch reality shows or daytime soaps, you missed the point.
Personally, my favorite sports team is Barcelona, but I live in Atlanta. $30 a month is amazingly cheaper than hopping on a plane, getting a hotel, going to the stadium, watching the 3 hours football game, grabbing a bite to eat, and flying home (nevermind the time costs). Instead, I watch it on FSC.
Simple really. Not everyone spends every waking moment learning things.
On the other hand, a lot of books are also entertainment. I'm not going to learn anything from Dan Brown or Tucker Max. I might read them because my flight is delayed, I already had to convince TSA that a toothbrush is not a weapon, and if I want a drink my choices are $4 for coffee at starbucks or $4 for a flat 20 oz coke at a generic airport vendor.
The best way to learn things is not tv or books. Experience is the only teacher worth listening to (cue the ridiculous examples of why this isn't true in 5...4..3..)
Slashdot Mirror
Because those are materials, not classes.
It is a fact because it is a fact. Let me remind you of what a fact is. A fact is an alleged event or circumstance, separate from a legal effect or consequence; something said to be true or supposed to have happened. Therefore, your being pathetic is a fact, even though you appear to find it questionable.
I will now revise the fact that was previously stated and referenced, to state that you are ignorant and pathetic.
I wasn't judging. I was simply stating a fact.
So if I buy one, but have two or more Kindles, I can read it on all of them?
Yes, you can. You just have to log out of one kindle and log in on another, and you have access to your entire library of purchased kindle books and documents on your personal server space.
Similiarly, you can indefinately lend a kindle book to a friend in Brazil, but only in the same example (log out on kindle 1, log in on kindle 2). Just like a dead tree book, if your friend in Brazil is reading it at the time, you can't.
No, you can't sell a kindle book to a used kindle bookstore. Obviously not, there is no difference between a new or used kindle book.
While you can't print out a chapter of a kindle book to take to read at the beach, you can do order of magnitude better. You can take your kindle to the beach, and read any book ever. If you haven't previously bought the book, you can buy and download any book, generally in under the time it would take for you to walk over to a snack vendor and buy something while at the beach. If you are short on money or don't like books, you can use the kindle to go online and read more craphound.com.
A reasonable consumer doesn't buy a kindle or books for it so that they can lend them to a friend or print copies. A reasonable consumer buys a kindle and kindle books specifically because they are user friendly, convenient, wider selection that most local bookstores (individually, if not in the aggregate), often cheaper than other legal sources, and allow you carry around as many books as you can afford without having to actually carry them around.
Personally, I find the e-ink screen easier to read than traditional books (which become harder to read due to fading, spills, text whose size/brightness/boldness can't be changed as my eyes turn older).
Meanwhile, you have doubts about the functionality of a product you have never used (or else you would not have such doubts) because you are worried about why the publishers don't want you having the ability to pirate. That is pathetic, and it makes you a pathetic person.
Are you sure that Mario and Sonic at the olympic games is a 3rd party title?
You can get it with free shipping and no tax from buy.com. A1books has it for 21.99 (didnt check the checkout price). It definately isnt close to $100.
The parents determine whether or not to hand the keys to the car over to the kid (unless, of course, the kid can pay for their own car, insurance, gas, maintenance, etc using just allowance). I don't go out of my way to tell parents how to raise their children. I simply treat children as citizens until they prove otherwise.
The privilege of driving a car, however, is not granted by the parents, but rather by the state, in the form of earning a driver's license.
Note that by the time Tyler is allowed to drive without restrictions from his state, he is likely 18 (except in some specific states, where its older than that), and thus should not be referred to as little.
The issue, of course, is that "little" Tyler needs to learn how to drive in a safe environment before he is personally responsible for everything that he does (and not his parents). The only conditions a parent should impose on their children for driving should be that the parents have personally witnessed the child driving safely in public. The rest will take care of itself through legal issues.
Speeding tickets, DUI, causing crashes (I don't care if its an accident, and neither does your insurance), etc. should be what keeps people off the road, and valid, up to date licenses are what
grants the privilege of driving. Not parental consent.
Am I the only one who thinks that kids who still recieves allowance shouldn't be allowed to drive?
I hope so.
The fact that parents give their kids money shouldn't preclude them from being of age and passing a driving exam.
An afternoon or less?
Wow, how convenient, compared to going to a store and buying it, which takes as much as 30 minutes round trip.
You idiot! Without the internet, how am I supposed to answer the poll?
Hate to point this out, but money spent on psychotic lawyers is actually better for a stock price than money spent on R&D.
Defense of a patent or trademark can be capitalized if successful, therefore, lawyer fees = asset.
R&D is money spent on the hope that something will become an asset, so its costs are expensed immediately.
There is no law against spending money on legal fees to pursue an option that may or may not result in success.
To sum up, there is no way that lawsuits whose sum legal costs are immaterial to the company have had any direct or indirect effect on stock prices (unless they win the lawsuit, in which case it probably helps).
As long as paper books exist, they will be more desirable to a specific segment of the market, specifically those who wish to resell their books. For those of us who like to keep our books, (mostly those of us who don't buy books unless we want to keep them), an electronic format is more convenient and provides a better selection. Therefore paper books will be more desireable based on lack of drm or ability to resell them because they already aren't.
On a much more important point than you calling me names that add no value to your point (there arent any shills or fanboys rushing to attack you, so dont call them out, and if you arent referring to me, then dont mention them, and if you are calling me names, then you should have spent 30 seconds reading my others posts on /. and noticed that it simply wouldnt be true. I just happen to disagree that drm is the only factor to look at when buying things.), you have an interesting contradiction within the same paragraph.
So you think that publisher's desire for control will kill the paper book market, but that consumer demand caused publishers to provide drm free music.
I don't know how you can state these two things. If you said them a year apart, I would still question it. But you said them in the same paragraph.
To be fair, if you actively choose to purchase a book with drm in electronic form over a paper version, you arent being repressed, whether or not you consider yourself to be part of the public. On the other hand, pirates generally aren't doing what they do for the public good either. They don't "got your back." They do it for notoriety (thats 'popularity' for the sake of being well known, rather than being well liked).
It is not an oppressive restriction to sell ebooks with drm. The solution to "I don't like drm" is not "pirate the book instead." Its "don't buy the book."
In other news, electronic versions of books do not prohibit you from going out and buying a dead tree version of a book. When the market for dead tree books is falling, and it can be shown that it is because of the existence of ebooks, then you might have a point. It still wouldn't be "pirate a book instead of buying it." It would be "buy it in a bookstore or a used bookstore or check it from the library or borrow it from someone else or do without."
Perhaps I did point out that electronic books contain additional costs. This point, however, is not a disincentive to purchase, for other reasons that I also highlighted.
I still hold that electronic distribution method of book sales, which have a method of resale restricted for valid purposes, are much more than just a fancy method of distribution for purpose of raising costs or that the added costs are a disincentive.
Cheaper is not the only function that goes into purchasing things.
Of course I don't admit such a lie.
On the one hand,I wouldn't have thrown out the argument already presented that happens to provide an incentive despite what you perceive to be a price difference for purchasing ebooks (ease of use, availability, recoverability in device failure [dead tree book vs ebook reade], and subscription services).
On the other hand, some of your sentence is wrong, while some of it is irrelevant.
To begin with, the wrong. You can, of course, sell your device. Just log out, have the person you sold it to set up their account, and suddenly, they don't have access to your books anymore. Or sell them your library and don't log out, and cancel your credit card so they have to change the user information to buy new stuff. Meanwhile, you can use a proprietary reader or a cell phone reader or a reader on your computer (I assume one of those two is how you posted on /., so you either self tether yourself to the device or you aren't tethered to it).
To be fair, you can loan your ebooks to others, but just like with a dead tree book, you can't have access at the time. Either let them borrow your device, or log out of your device and have them log in as you on theirs. Voila, they can read your entire library.
Now for the points of relevance. Believe it or not, there is a difference between paperback and electronic form. If you sell a paperback book, the publisher has no requirement to keep track of this fact. If you sell an ebook, they have to unregister the sale from you and re-register the sale to someone else. They then have to transfer the ebook to a device for a new person. This of course, means they would have to treat this as a sale, without collecting money, which means they would have to pay royalties. Note that this is true even if you give a book away. Most royalties agreements are based on a combination of percentage of sales and number of copies sold. Since royalies are paid upon sale, they aren't going to get credit for the transfer. The only reason this isn't done with dead tree books is because it isn't possible.
To recap, there is a large incentive to buy ebooks, which is reflected in the difference in price between them and dead tree books. To claim that you specifically are immune to this incentive is a lie. If you want to say that the incentive doesn't break your threshold for purchase, I'm not going to be able to convince you, but no retailer is going to care about your niche, irrelevant complaints.
You feel like you are being lied to for 2 reasons:
1) You went into the conversation looking to be lied to, so you found a reason to believe it.
2) You don't understand the difference between paperback and electronic books.
While I am going to go ahead and ignore the fact that you chose one price point from one website for one book for one currency exchange rate at one point in time and then tried to claim that prices in a different medium for all products at all times in all currencies must also be the similiar (Ok, I didn't ignore it, but what are you being lied to about if I'm not spot on, what are you being lied to about?), I will briefly explain why this is irrelevant (without approaching those issues).
While I am simplifying here,
The costs for a paperback book include obtaining the copyight, printing the books, point of sale costs (either website or cashier in a physical store), and royalties on sales. If the book doesn't sell well, you may have warehousing costs, but these are sold through websites or to bookstores that do sell a lot and need JIT inventory, which actually lowers your cost of goods sold.
The copyright, royalties, and POS costs (if website) are relatively fixed. The POS costs and printing costs are negligible due to volume. Therefore, a book that costs $4 to sell, even if stored for 50 years, is not going to go up in cost. Of course, after a long period of time, you just make a new edition, and people buy an old book again.
Electronic books, on the other hand, have additional costs. Since you arent printing a specific number of books, but rather you are keeping a master copy on a server that needs encryption and protection against non-sales, the cost of having one book for sale could be higher. You still have to obtain the copyright, pay royalties on sales, etc. Now you also have the cost of setting up user accounts so that when John Smith buys a book, he doesn't have to keep his downloaded book on his proprietary reader. He can keep it on his user account and redownload whenever he wants to read it. This would be negligible except that you are paying a per sold reading device, along with a per book sold fee for the network bandwidth. This is cheaper in the long run because some users buy the reader, then don't buy a lot of books.
Users, on the hand, find the value of an ebook reader beyond that of a paperback. If I buy 10000 books (not all at once, that would be silly) for my ebook reader, and it dies, I can get a new ebook reader and read all of my books within an hour (depending on traffic). If my house burns down, I cannot replace my books. The same editions are not necessarily available, I probably don't remember all of them, and I gurantee you I don't have $100000 lying around just to repurchase books. Then again, maybe I'm on the subway or at the airport or in the car on a roadtrip or at the hotel on a business trip or on vacation or standing in line at the post office or waiting in the parking lot to pick up my kids from school or just woke up the morning after and its awkward and I need a distraction or its cheaper because the book is brand new or my car is low on gas and I don't want to leave the house cause its raining and theres nothing on tv or [you really read all these examples, didn't you] and thus a bookstore is out of question because I want to read a new book immediately. Believe it or not, I'm willing to pay a premium for that and so are most people. In addition to immediate access to a book, you get access to far, far more titles than all of the bookstores in your city might carry. With the kindle,you get magazines and newspapers too.
Of course, to give users this useability, there are higher costs. Since the Kindle is based on a US service provider, international costs are quite reasonably higher. Since this is a servcie, and not just a book, it is possible that VAT bumps the higher cost even higher. I'm not going to bother to try to explain currency exchange to you, but suffice it say that people like books to cost them the same regardless of when they buy it, since age isnt a factor for ebooks, but exchange rates do change and the possibility of the dollar weakening is factored into the price.
Back in college, I worked in a restaurant where initially we played the radio in the kitchen for employees during slow hours. At some point, we received a warning letter, so we got rid of the radio, which only employees could hear, and replaced it with a speaker system that played throughout the restaurant. We then changed the policy so that only cds brought in by employees could be played over the speakers. As far as I know (havent worked there in 3 years), they still don't pay anything for doing so.
Actually, if you were able to offer zero cents, then buying the game would make no difference to your finances.
If you saved 1 cent from 1000 publishers (assuming you are just buying world of goo), you would have spent 19990 instead of 20000, but you still would have 20 grand lying around, and probably wouldn't bother arguing the difference between a zero cent and a one cent game.
Why is that a concern for you as a consumer?
I would assume that to be B&N's issue, not yours. Unless of course the ability to pirate things causes you to no longer wish to purchase. That would be like not buying an mp3 player because it will play music that wasn't purchased from amazon or itunes.
Is your bed made of concrete?
I have had my kindle fall out of my car, dropped it down a flight of stairs, and spilled wine on it. It has no problems. How could you possibly have broken it by sitting on it in a soft bed? Did you take a running start and knock it out of a 3 story window?
To be fair, my bike weighs 190 lbs, with me on it.
The regular one, and you split 10s against a dealers 4
Not even close to a proper analogy.
Its more like going to whole foods vs publix vs kroger vs (local businessman) and buying a 2 liter of coke in the new family style bottle.
At whole foods, its $9.
At publix, its $3.
At kroger, its $5, but you have to have a kroger credit card to buy it, but if you have bought a 2 liter of coke before, since its in new packaging, you can get a second copy for a friend who also has an account but hasn't bought it before.
The local businessman charges 2.50, but he is sold out and wont be getting more in for a while due to high return rates.
I'll say BOOOOOO to this. The DS is the last system where developers don't have the bias that 2D is somehow out of style and will actually put significant resources behind a 2D game,
Unless you count the wii, the PS2, or flash.
Books are not a substitute for cable television. You also heavily overestimate the cost of both books and cable television. If you can only choose one for informational needs, you choose television, hands down. News, oddly enough (not the crap on CNN) doesn't tend to age well. If I want to learn that Barack Obama won a nobel peace prize for doing nothing, I'm not going to read about it in a book. If I want to find out how my investments are doing, I'm not going to find that in a book either. If I want to learn organic chemistry, I'm going to learn about it in a lab, not in a book. If I want to learn computer science, I'm also not going to use a book. If I want to learn grammar, maybe I'll use a book. It could be more efficient than an english course, which tends not to focus on books. On that note, based on your grammar, you must have been watching a ton of science/history/discovery channels.
While books tend to age well, what you really pay for with tv is up to the minute news, live sports, and occassional escapes from reality. Sure, if all you use tv for is to watch reality shows or daytime soaps, you missed the point.
Personally, my favorite sports team is Barcelona, but I live in Atlanta. $30 a month is amazingly cheaper than hopping on a plane, getting a hotel, going to the stadium, watching the 3 hours football game, grabbing a bite to eat, and flying home (nevermind the time costs). Instead, I watch it on FSC.
Simple really. Not everyone spends every waking moment learning things.
On the other hand, a lot of books are also entertainment. I'm not going to learn anything from Dan Brown or Tucker Max. I might read them because my flight is delayed, I already had to convince TSA that a toothbrush is not a weapon, and if I want a drink my choices are $4 for coffee at starbucks or $4 for a flat 20 oz coke at a generic airport vendor.
The best way to learn things is not tv or books. Experience is the only teacher worth listening to (cue the ridiculous examples of why this isn't true in 5...4..3..)