I'm typing this from a 10" netbook with a lush keyboard, a bright screen and 8 hour battery life. It has a proper OS, can do pretty much anything I want, and stores far more data than any tablet currently could.

Why would I care what Amazon are doing??

I want one for my mum. There's no wired broadband where she is in France, and a cheap tablet that does very basic internet and email for free in addition to being an excellent ebook is exactly what she needs. She reads a lot of books, and she needs email. She'd like access to Wikipedia but that's about it. Free internet even at dial-up speeds would be life-changing.

But at what cost??

It's the whole ebook bit that makes the difference for many, especially if the price is right

The advantages of an ebook are the long battery life. Perfect for a holiday. An LCD screen will not last anywhere near that. Even an iPad cannot compete with the battery life of an eBook reader. They could be very different markets. If they have a colour screen they might as well opt to work on the iPad.

Like anything, it'll be a compromise. You'll still get hours out of it no matter what you do with it, and the potential hybrid device would probably be even better in that regard. It's not like people aren't willing to charge portable devices these days either

No I do agree. I am seriously considering the Kindle but I do think that restrictions that tie me to one store are not necessarily a good thing. The same applies to Applies effectively locking out other book stores. That route should be the most logical direction for bookstores. Though Apple and Amazon have locked them out. Maybe a monopolies investigation would be appropriate.

You're over stating the case a little. There are many online book stores that sell products that can be viewed on the kindle and iPad equally (Pragmatic Bookshelf, for example, will sell you a book in both epd and kindle formats). PLus you have the whole of the Gutenberg project library on whatever format you want it to be on for free. And many other sellers sell in PDF, which can be viewed on both.

You may feel you're restricted by the fact the main shops on those platforms use DRM but the fact is you're only restricted in what you can buy from them specifically, which would be true even if they weren't using DRM. Looking a bit further afield will show you the lines are much blurrier than you think.

Jon

If it comes to it, I'll be testing a few file formats with conversion software just to see if there's any hiccups in that regard

The birth of the Kindle Tablet and the death of the public library



http://www.extremetech.com/computing/97 ... eedfetcher

Done right, the Kindle will be a licence to print money. Maybe even after everyone tries to renegotiate

That sounds like an interesting deal. It makes prime actually worth while. Though on saturday I found out about Tesco's DVD and game rental service from £4.47 per month. It looks like these deals are getting common and worth considering.

Q&A at Kindle demo: What Fire can and can't do (September 28, 2011)

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/b ... nqa29.html

What I found most interesting was that he owns both machines - it's either 'We'd really like you to buy both!', or 'Yeah, you probably won't wanna read too much text on the Fire'.

I may have ordered the standard reader by the end of tonight

How do they get away with saying battery life is one month? Based on reading for 30 mins each day.

I've seen all sorts of theories, claims etc, but apparently it uses minimal power until you actually 'turn a page'

So fast readers with bad eyesight will be discriminated against. Oh well what I was getting at is that if I read it is for much more than 30 mins a day. 15 hours wouldn't even last a flight to Oz, so you're pretty much stuffed if you fly BA, Qantas or Virgin, who don't provide power at seats last time I looked.