Comments on: Could an Apple iTablet be a Kindle e-Book and e-Comic Killer?

By: robinson

robinson — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 20:08:55 +0000

Sign me up! I’d like one, too. OUr newspaper subscription just rose to $240 (with gratuity for carrier). At that amount of $$, an ebook/web surfing/email device for $500-700 looks real sweet. It’d be a 3-year payback and have so much more utility!

By: TK

TK — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 05:53:17 +0000

I would want one for sure. I don’t really think that Sony or Amazon have products that are usable for me. Number 1 thing is size, get a least full pages screen size. Number 2 all of these newspapers are getting hit with lower subscription numbers and they are complaining how nobody wants to pay for their content, just use ebook readers that work well and make it easy to get content. I’m planing on buying an ebook reader, just hoping maybe apple will come up with iPhone type device for ebooks.

By: Graham D.

Graham D. — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 10:34:47 +0000

@Loz – good recovery with that second post!

Things get interesting… I’m a UK user – and i’m due for an upgrade in days! I’ve been waiting to get an iphone since last year (contracts GRRR!) – but now i’m waiting for the next one to come outsimply because I don’t wanna have an iphone thats outdated for 15 months of my 18 month contract.

I’m not a reader normally – but if its on one of my beloved gadgets then i may be tempted to do it a little more. That said – with the rest of the apps and tools it coems with etc… i may be a little bit preoccupied!

By: Manuel R. Ciosici

Manuel R. Ciosici — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 05:26:28 +0000

Sean, Hakala and Benoit Cerrina have a point. But if I were to launch a giant bookstore I would also make sure that in my bookstore I have thousands of free, out of copyright books, and so that my competitors don’t say I’m piggybacking on projects Gutenberg and atchive.org I would also help digitise a few thousands books. This way, I would have shut up the competition and also gained another great weapon for the marketing department.

By: Benoit Cerrina

Benoit Cerrina — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 04:48:59 +0000

With Hakala and Sean, the idead of an ebook distributor scanning books is ridiculous. To publish an ebook they need the authorization from the copyright holder and they would have the book in electronic format already or they wouldn’t have been able to publish it! The only people scanning actual recent books to make ebooks are pirates. It does make sense to scan old out of print books which were never in electronic format but we are talking really old there.

By: Hakala

Hakala — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 04:37:36 +0000

Sean does make an excellant point though, why would apple copy the books, when most likely they would, again as sean said, contract it out. Or else have the publishers do it.

By: Hakala

Hakala — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 04:34:48 +0000

Apple is a predictable but unpredictable company. They very well could be making e-books. Or it could be a complete rumor. Only apple knows. All we can do is wait until the end of march. Who knows, maybe it will be announced earlier!

By: Sean peters

Sean peters — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 23:28:24 +0000

I think it’s highly unlikely that Apple would scan huge numbers of books themselves – they’re not in the book scanning business. That task would be contracted out. And even that assumes that the books NEED to be scanned – surely you’d need to have the publishers onboard, and they’d already have the books in electronic format. Paying folks to stand around in front of a scanner to manually scan all those books would be prohibitively expensive.

By: Loz

Loz — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 22:40:33 +0000

Past or passed? Guess I need to read more

By: Loz

Loz — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 22:34:58 +0000

Sounds like a nice idea but I can't imagine having time to read a book on mine before getting distracted by a phonecall, text, email, game, net search, iPod track change etc.

I don't think I'd get passed page 1!