From my perspective many of the arguments against these readers don't really hold water. True, Amazon can remove an item from your kindle without your consent but I only recall that happening once and they apologized for their mistake. The mistake was that they made a book available for free download that turned out to have had rights attached to it. Since they had provided the book by mistake they felt it their obligation to correct that mistake. They screwed up, no question but that is a corner case and it is silly to worry about content you've paid for being deleted because of that corner case.
I bought a kindle last summer, not because I love gadgets and can't wait to hack my kindle so I can use it to vi all my important documents. I bought the kindle because I love to read and I travel. I like being able to carry a collection of reference books and novels. I love the builtin dictionary so that I can get the definitions as needed instead of writing the word down for lookup later if I get around to it. It's convenient and kinda nice that I don't have paper books cluttering up my apartment that I invariably forget to bring with me on a trip.
They are expensive, no question but the solution for that is nothing more than volume and competition. Since other vendors are entering the space I think it is inevitable that prices will come down and at least possible that a common format will be adopted by all of them. Meanwhile, I'll enjoy reading.
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From my perspective many of the arguments against these readers don't really hold water. True, Amazon can remove an item from your kindle without your consent but I only recall that happening once and they apologized for their mistake. The mistake was that they made a book available for free download that turned out to have had rights attached to it. Since they had provided the book by mistake they felt it their obligation to correct that mistake. They screwed up, no question but that is a corner case and it is silly to worry about content you've paid for being deleted because of that corner case. I bought a kindle last summer, not because I love gadgets and can't wait to hack my kindle so I can use it to vi all my important documents. I bought the kindle because I love to read and I travel. I like being able to carry a collection of reference books and novels. I love the builtin dictionary so that I can get the definitions as needed instead of writing the word down for lookup later if I get around to it. It's convenient and kinda nice that I don't have paper books cluttering up my apartment that I invariably forget to bring with me on a trip. They are expensive, no question but the solution for that is nothing more than volume and competition. Since other vendors are entering the space I think it is inevitable that prices will come down and at least possible that a common format will be adopted by all of them. Meanwhile, I'll enjoy reading.
Orbitz IT decision makers had a poor track record before this. In 2003 the site was offline for 13 hours. They blamed the outage on Oracle RAC.f d_top
http://news.com.com/2100-1017_3-1026450.html?tag=
Several articles from comp.databases.oracle.server talk about how Orbitz had implemented 9iRAC on a Wintel platform.