Very true. It is not the featherweight that a Kindle is. The glass screen probably accounts for a large part of that.

If you don't buy books through Apple, you could get both and use the right device for the right situation. At $150 for an E-ink reader that starts to get practical.

I'd buy any of the e-readers the minute they offered a free (or very, very cheap) version of every physical book that I am buying (or have bought recently). For instance, I'd buy a Kindle if I could get to read the 100 or so books I've bought off of Amazon in the last couple of years. It would be AWESOME to be able to read my physical book up to page whatever, but switch to an e-reader for a trip. Or I'd buy the Barnes and Noble e-reader if they gave me credit for the B&N purchases I've made (of physical books).

When buying my Kindle, I underestimated my reluctance to pay $10 for a book that I could buy for much less in softcover and be totally happy with. There is rarely a book that I just can't wait for the softcover.

I still want to see how the DRM settles out.

Zenkitty, have you compared Kindle prices to actual softcover prices at the same time? Generally, when the paperback comes out, the Kindle price drops to a price point lower than the paperback.

I buy very few books at the $9.99 price point. Mostly books that I'm pretty sure will ALWAYS be hard to find cheaper than that (the kind of literary fiction / chick lit that doesn't come out in anything but trade paperback).

javachick, I'm afraid what you want is never going to happen. Amazon/B&N doesn't own the copyright to those books, remember, they just pass licenses along to you. Publishers are not likely to give you an option like that when they might potentially convince you to buy your favorite books a second time (like when I bought Cryptonomicon for the Kindle because I wanted to re-read but couldn't handle the idea of carrying the 8-pound hardcover around for the weeks it would have required. And at the time, it cost me less than $10.)

That said, I've ahemmed a couple of books that I already own (e.g. Harry Potter, when I wanted to re-read the entire series on vacation and didn't have a separate suitcase to pack them in) and converted them for my Kindle with absolutely no guilt and, arguably, no legal culpability. Not necessarily a recommended path, but a possible one.

Huh. I just checked, and I actually discovered that the Kindle edition of Cryptonomicon is now $2 more expensive than the paperback version. Price "set by the publisher". That really pisses me off. Are they TRYING to kill this industry?

Comcast is coming out today to put the Cable Card in my new Tivo Premium. Is there anything specific I should be asking about or making sure gets taken care of? I haven't even taken the new machine out of the box as yet.

You should hook everything up and run Guided Setup on the Tivo before they get there - it will save you at least an hour.

Are they TRYING to kill this industry?

From what I've read? Kinda, yeah.

Gris,

Huh. I just checked, and I actually discovered that the Kindle edition of Cryptonomicon is now $2 more expensive than the paperback version. Price "set by the publisher". That really pisses me off. Are they TRYING to kill this industry?

So, I got a kindle for Christmas and what I typically buy for the kindle are books that are "throwaway" books - books I would buy in an airport bookstore to read and then likely not read again. I'm a voracious pop fiction reader, so the kindle is perfect for me in this respect.

I also agree with you with respect to downloading books I have physically copies of already (I do that). I also bought some barnes & noble ebooks and I found means on the interwebs to remove the DRM and convert them to kindle/stanza format.

You might want to check around Amazon for more of these "publisher set the price" books. The amazon reviews are really throttling the books that the publishers hike the price for. I first noticed it when reading the reviews of Scott Turow's latest book. I was wondering why they came in at 1 star, then I started reading the reviews.

Thanks Jessica - I'm running through all that stuff now and I have over 90 minutes before my appointment window starts. I tried to move the old Tivo to the other room but I can't get it to play nice with the digital converter. Hopefully I can get the guy to fix that too.