The eyestrain issue is (greatly) over-rated. I've needed glasses for at least the past 7 years, and I was already an eBook reader when age finally caught up with my eyeballs. All I had to do was get a decent pair of reader glasses with enough magnification, and I would have needed them for the treeware editions anyway.
The really nice thing about my phone and tablet is that you can set the font size to make it easier to read. If I've forgotten my reading glasses, I can just boost the font size, and as long as I don't read "Meter Maids in Bondage" in public with LARGE FONT, I'm good.
I'm glad you put "fix" in quotes. Trying to force your customers to do what YOU want them to do instead of assisting them in doing what THEY want to do is suicide in the business world. Just ask the MAFIAA.
To paraphrase Sun Tzu, "Supreme excellence in the art of marketing is getting people to give you their money and making them glad to do it.
B&N has been somewhat schizophrenic about eBooks from the beginning, trying desperately to keep up with Amazon on one hand and yet not cannibalize their precious treeware stores. As a result, they've managed to fail at both goals.
Worse yet, they managed to buy, and then ignore, everything Fictionwise could have taught them about marketing eBooks and doing it right. I was a loyal (and VERY happy) Fictionwise customer for a decade. FW did three things that were absolutely priceless in marketing eBooks to me.
1. FW let you request email notifications when a new book by a particular author you were interested in was available. Naturally, as soon as I got such a notification...
B&N is still doing the old "These are the books WE want to sell you." routine with "push" emails and "new now" notices for books I couldn't care less about.
2. FW (and Books on Board) had a shopping cart for eBooks. Fictionwise had both "buy all of these at once" and "download them all in a ZIP file." My record buy was something like 25 books in one day when one of my favorite authors had all of his stuff released (finally) to eBook format. Fewer obstacles to purchase == more purchases. You'd think an experienced retailer would figure that out.
B&N: "Click once for each book" crud that both Amazon and B&N impose on readers. The day Paulo Coelho's books were put on sale at $1/each, I had to click "buy" and "confirm" eleven times, and when it came time to balance my credit card account... (cue loud curses)
3. If you went to an author's page at FW (e.g. Poul Anderson), you got a "show me only books by this author I don't own" and "buy everything that's showing" buttons. See my note about "fewer obstacles" above.
B&N: MISSING IN ACTION
4. FW frequently offered the ability to buy eBooks at listed price and get an equal amount in store credit. Result: I frequently took advantage of the offer, got best-sellers at full list, and then used the credits to buy more eBooks. From my standpoint, I got the best-sellers for free, and then used the credits to "buy out" other authors I wanted everything they did.
B&N: MISSING IN ACTION
It is a shame that B&N bought the major ebook retailer who knew how to do it right and then ignored everything they had done in order to cripple their eBook store as a doomed effort to force people to walk into their bricks-and-mortar.
Riot starts, demonstration starts, somebody says "Kill the phones." The providers will love it. They'll just slap a "reactivation fee" on everybody, even innocent bystanders, whose phones got zapped.
The brick-and-mortar brigade has been bitching for years about the supposed "unfairness" of "they don't pay sales taxes but we do." They finally browbeat Congress into doing something.
Amazon's argument was about the burden of having to keep track of over seven thousand districts (I looked this number up.), having to update them the moment things change, and the legal penalties for any failure to keep track of changes. So they asked for, and got, a national single-tax regime, which, presumably, any business selling online can keep track of and meet, including the brick-and-mortarsaurs.
And if this is a disaster for the mortarsaurs, they will have only themselves to blame for the new K-T boundary.
There is no such thing as "DRM done right." There's only "YOU own what you bought and paid for." or "WE still own it, even if you bought and paid for it."
Consumers put up with DRM, in exactly the same way they put up with exorbitant prices for gas, "convenience fees" and other corporate tactics to sink a sump into their wallets.
When I buy movies, books, or music, if I can't jailbreak them, I don't buy them. Period. End of story.
Everybody I talk to either hates DRM or thanks me for telling them where the picklocks are.
There's a famous Alexis Gilliland cartoon of a cruise missile thinking "They've got me aimed at a computer center! I'll just fly a bit farther and hit the maternity ward."
The cops would probably get an exemption from the requirement. But that only makes it MORE worthwhile for bad guys to ambush them and steal their guns.
And if you DON'T give them an exemption from the requirement, they'll still be wearing gloves in winter. Bye bye biometrics.
Gloves, of course, aren't the ONLY way biometrics can go weird. Dirt, dust, mud, oil, almost any contaminant on the surface of the hand would probably mess up the sensors, for the good guys and the bad guys.
Guns are like tennis rackets. They have to work when they're needed. The only difference in the reliability requirement between a tennis racket and a firearm is that nobody dies when a racket breaks a string just as it's desperately needed to win.
It is by the juice of java that cells acquire speed The body begins to grow The growth becomes a forming. It is by caffeine alone I set my cells in motion
I'm still running iOS5 on my iPhone4 and iPad2 ignoring plaintive bleats that I think are "upgrade me" whimpers. Why? Bezos bought Lexcycle, which made Stanza. He's suppressed updates because it makes any Kindle look like the junk it is.
I won't upgrade my iOS until there's a Stanza update that runs on it.
Slashdot Mirror
The eyestrain issue is (greatly) over-rated. I've needed glasses for at least the past 7 years, and I was already an eBook reader when age finally caught up with my eyeballs. All I had to do was get a decent pair of reader glasses with enough magnification, and I would have needed them for the treeware editions anyway.
The really nice thing about my phone and tablet is that you can set the font size to make it easier to read. If I've forgotten my reading glasses, I can just boost the font size, and as long as I don't read "Meter Maids in Bondage" in public with LARGE FONT, I'm good.
I'm glad you put "fix" in quotes. Trying to force your customers to do what YOU want them to do instead of assisting them in doing what THEY want to do is suicide in the business world. Just ask the MAFIAA.
To paraphrase Sun Tzu, "Supreme excellence in the art of marketing is getting people to give you their money and making them glad to do it.
B&N has been somewhat schizophrenic about eBooks from the beginning, trying desperately to keep up with Amazon on one hand and yet not cannibalize their precious treeware stores. As a result, they've managed to fail at both goals.
Worse yet, they managed to buy, and then ignore, everything Fictionwise could have taught them about marketing eBooks and doing it right. I was a loyal (and VERY happy) Fictionwise customer for a decade. FW did three things that were absolutely priceless in marketing eBooks to me.
1. FW let you request email notifications when a new book by a particular author you were interested in was available. Naturally, as soon as I got such a notification...
B&N is still doing the old "These are the books WE want to sell you." routine with "push" emails and "new now" notices for books I couldn't care less about.
2. FW (and Books on Board) had a shopping cart for eBooks. Fictionwise had both "buy all of these at once" and "download them all in a ZIP file." My record buy was something like 25 books in one day when one of my favorite authors had all of his stuff released (finally) to eBook format. Fewer obstacles to purchase == more purchases. You'd think an experienced retailer would figure that out.
B&N: "Click once for each book" crud that both Amazon and B&N impose on readers. The day Paulo Coelho's books were put on sale at $1/each, I had to click "buy" and "confirm" eleven times, and when it came time to balance my credit card account... (cue loud curses)
3. If you went to an author's page at FW (e.g. Poul Anderson), you got a "show me only books by this author I don't own" and "buy everything that's showing" buttons. See my note about "fewer obstacles" above.
B&N: MISSING IN ACTION
4. FW frequently offered the ability to buy eBooks at listed price and get an equal amount in store credit. Result: I frequently took advantage of the offer, got best-sellers at full list, and then used the credits to buy more eBooks. From my standpoint, I got the best-sellers for free, and then used the credits to "buy out" other authors I wanted everything they did.
B&N: MISSING IN ACTION
It is a shame that B&N bought the major ebook retailer who knew how to do it right and then ignored everything they had done in order to cripple their eBook store as a doomed effort to force people to walk into their bricks-and-mortar.
Think of it as evolution in action.
"You're under arrest for possession of a pirated copy of "Megasuper Blockbuster."
"How do you know it's pirated?"
"There are no spelling or punctuation errors in it!"
Yeah, but shutting down the towers doesn't deactivate the phones. Shutting people up is the whole POINT of doing something like this.
Riot starts, demonstration starts, somebody says "Kill the phones." The providers will love it. They'll just slap a "reactivation fee" on everybody, even innocent bystanders, whose phones got zapped.
The brick-and-mortar brigade has been bitching for years about the supposed "unfairness" of "they don't pay sales taxes but we do." They finally browbeat Congress into doing something.
Amazon's argument was about the burden of having to keep track of over seven thousand districts (I looked this number up.), having to update them the moment things change, and the legal penalties for any failure to keep track of changes. So they asked for, and got, a national single-tax regime, which, presumably, any business selling online can keep track of and meet, including the brick-and-mortarsaurs.
And if this is a disaster for the mortarsaurs, they will have only themselves to blame for the new K-T boundary.
I'll tell you when you're older, dear.
There is no such thing as "DRM done right." There's only "YOU own what you bought and paid for." or "WE still own it, even if you bought and paid for it."
Well? I'm waiting for an answer.
DRM is chosen by the PUBLISHERS, not Amazon. Amazon is perfectly happy to sell DRM-free kindle/mobi content.
I have a number of books via AMZN I didn't have to jailbreak so I could convert them to ePub and move them to my phone.
I call BS.
Consumers put up with DRM, in exactly the same way they put up with exorbitant prices for gas, "convenience fees" and other corporate tactics to sink a sump into their wallets.
When I buy movies, books, or music, if I can't jailbreak them, I don't buy them. Period. End of story.
Everybody I talk to either hates DRM or thanks me for telling them where the picklocks are.
But NOBODY "doesn't mind" DRM.
There's a famous Alexis Gilliland cartoon of a cruise missile thinking "They've got me aimed at a computer center! I'll just fly a bit farther and hit the maternity ward."
>There's nothing to stop someone who has physical access from just ripping them out though, as they're not required for the car to work.
Remember the car alarm scene in "Suburban Commando"?
Hulk Hogan approaches a car that has the sun roof open.
Car screams "You are too close to the vehicle!"
Hogan reaches into the car and grabs the alarm unit in preparation for ripping it out.
"On second thought, take the car!"
Hogan rips it out anyway.
For something like that, (no cloud), you can build in an emergency access code. (1234?) :)
It'll be the "upset driver" that would be a bitch to override.
And if it's mandatory, you could have a lot of fun activating the deactivated detectors on the cop cars.
"Why won't this car work for you?"
"That's my secret, Captain, I'm angry all the time."
A google car which detects whether you're upset and refuses to start even if your wife's water just broke.
And if it has to stab you each time you pull the trigger? I can see it now.
*ouch* Bang! *ouch* Bang! *ouch* Bang!
The cops would probably get an exemption from the requirement. But that only makes it MORE worthwhile for bad guys to ambush them and steal their guns.
And if you DON'T give them an exemption from the requirement, they'll still be wearing gloves in winter. Bye bye biometrics.
Gloves, of course, aren't the ONLY way biometrics can go weird. Dirt, dust, mud, oil, almost any contaminant on the surface of the hand would probably mess up the sensors, for the good guys and the bad guys.
Guns are like tennis rackets. They have to work when they're needed. The only difference in the reliability requirement between a tennis racket and a firearm is that nobody dies when a racket breaks a string just as it's desperately needed to win.
Cops in Minnesota in the dead of a winter snowstorm are just gonna LOVE this tech.
I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords.
It is by the juice of java that cells acquire speed
The body begins to grow
The growth becomes a forming.
It is by caffeine alone I set my cells in motion
And after starting the fire attempt to micturate on it to put it out.
The Cube 3D. An outrageous price-tag, locked-down functionality, overpriced model store, proprietary cartridges All that’s missing is an Apple logo.
Credit: FutureCyberdyneEngineer
I'm still running iOS5 on my iPhone4 and iPad2 ignoring plaintive bleats that I think are "upgrade me" whimpers. Why? Bezos bought Lexcycle, which made Stanza. He's suppressed updates because it makes any Kindle look like the junk it is.
I won't upgrade my iOS until there's a Stanza update that runs on it.
"genes overall". I wasn't aware my overalls HAD genes!