[jammies]

This lady on the plane beside me last month had a Kindle and wouldn't shut up about it. To be fair, the screen looked quite nice and she was quite rightly pimping the wireless aspect of it (although I didn't know that doesn't work in Canada, or I could have burst her bubble), but you'd think she was bringing fire to the savages the way she was going on and on.

I'm not sure if these devices are ever going to take off, myself. Books are already in a format that is portable, cheap, and easy to use, and best of all, encapsulated - once I have a book, I don't need to recharge its power, retrieve it from archive or redownload it, I can lend it out or sell it if I want, and I can scribble dirty pictures in the margins if I so desire. Ebooks seem like another backdoor way to try to use technology to control information past the point of sale, a doctrine which I vehemently detest.

The one real advantage I see for ebooks is that you can have one device with multiple books on it - but until they start coming with serious memory where I can actually put a whole library on one, and where I can share that library with friends (ie - probably never), I'm going to stick with paper.

*I have bought a couple pdf ebooks on IT subjects, as they are considerably cheaper that way, and I can read them on my laptop during lunch or when I have slack time during the work day, but that is different as I don't read those subjects for enjoyment and the books are definitely limited in how long they are relevant so I don't care if I can't access them 5-10 years down the road.