I'm sure you have seen, heard of or tried Amazon's kindle reader. It's a device that permits you to download books to a portable reader and ... umm read them there. There's several advantages to this: One thing is that you can carry quite a few 'books' with you on the one device, so for those frequent travellers among us, that's a truly neat thing. There also seems to be a slightly less wasteful production process (no books are being printed, paper wasted, ink produced etc - on the other hand, you need to produce another digital product that's likely filling up the landfills in African and other developing countries within a few years).
What annoys me about this piece is that (at least until very recently) Amazon could remotely delete content from the device, that its format is proprietory (ie you have to download from amazon), that its readability is questionable (particularly when there's bright sunshine) and importantly that you save only pennies on the price of a printed volume. The latter is particularly odd, given that the cost of printing a book are much much more substantial than the cost of sending a file to someone.
What are your views on the kindle??
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