Bonus Amazon deal: Cheap Kindles (thanks to Oprah)

[yendi]

You can now get the Kindle for $309, thanks to Oprah's endorsement. The $359 price (cheaper than what we paid, since Amazon shafted early adopters and didn't handle things nearly as well as Apple did with the iPhone) is good, but if you use the code OPRAHWINFREY at checkout, they'll knock another $50 off the price. At $309, it's even better.

Comments

[unquietsoul5.livejournal.com]

I'm waiting for an under $100 e-reader. Until then it's not getting my money, considering how expensive the books are. The Kindle is a content delivery device, and like cell phones, should be free as part of a subscription deal (Or with a small monthly rental fee, like a cable box).

[yendi]

That's one way to look at it, but for us, paying up front for the hardware, and then only rarely paying for e-books (as publishers like Tor and Baen have released dozens of them for free) has worked out.

[unquietsoul5.livejournal.com]

Well the way I look at it, the Kindle also is very proprietary.... it's not like I can use it for personal files and notes or to use with roleplaying game books in PDF format or anything, so it's just not as useful to me as just plain buying the books on paper.

I'm picky, and have been dealing with ebooks since the multimedia CD disk days and pre-HTML hypertext software packages. A separate Ereader has to be pretty useful and cheap for me to invest in one out of my pocket. I've seen too many of them come and go over the years, their content only usable on their own models etc.