Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Flipping Through E-Readers, a Skeptic Becomes a Believer


That's the title of a piece in the Los Angeles Times.

From the article...

This is the year that e-readers such as Amazon's Kindle, the Barnes & Noble Nook and Apple's iPad are expected to break into the big time. This has been predicted before every Christmas buying season for years. But this time, thanks to the advance of technology and the decline of price (with one notable exception), we may actually move beyond hype and into reality.

So now may be the right moment for me to offer a subjective buyer's guide on what's good about these things and what's indifferent. I come at this task as a lifelong voracious reader and adherent of the books-as-totems school of household design: One entire wall of our family room is a bookcase, floor to ceiling, and piles of books unstrategically decorate almost every other room too.

Yet over the last seven months I've become a convert to e-reading, to the point where reading something bound and on paper seems almost quaint. I never thought I would make this transition, certainly not so effortlessly. I say this in full awareness that this trend may do incalculable harm to traditional bookstores, places where I have spent incalculable hours of my life.

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