Amazon to Cut E-Book Prices, Shaking Rivals (making Amazon a Monopoly)

[Fumesucker]

106. I think your analysis of paper books versus e/publishing and electronic readers is a bit off..

I'm buying all my non-blog type reading material at the second hand store/flea market, being long term unemployed I have no choice, many of the books I buy are decades old, quite a few have been read many times, it's obvious from their condition. The e-reader you buy today will be supplanted in a few years with an "improved" model or will just break or wear out, in any case it will be replaced at some point.

Physical books are around for a long time, if computers are any indication of how e-readers are going to go, a decade old e-reader will be ancient and probably obsolete, meanwhile the paper book will still be sitting there on the shelf or in the box.

If I had put a bunch of books on 5.25" floppy discs I'd be SOL trying to read them today unless I had converted them to some other format probably at least a decade ago, 3.25" disk readers are still around on older computers but they too will be gone fairly shortly.

On the other hand it's still possible to read a Gutenberg Bible with no format conversion necessary.

People for the most part don't back up their data, those e-books are going to be ephemeral in many cases, gone with the first borked e-reader.

I'm not saying the e-reader is not superior in many ways, I'm just pointing out that the situation is not quite as unbalanced as your analysis might indicate.