Please read first: http://www.standard.co.uk/news/get-londo...90010.html
Quote:I have gone ahead and ordered one of these. I have always liked the idea of owning a e-reader but the price always seemed to high to me. For the most part popular selling books are only slightly cheaper in the ebook electronic format over getting the physical paperback.
For an example I was looking into getting "A Song of Ice and Fire".
The ebook version costs £29.99: http://tinyurl.com/cedwuwq
The paperback costs £29.05: http://tinyurl.com/chrgsed
So there isn't a huge saving buying ebooks over paperbacks for popular titles.
I also found it hard to justify paying over £70 for an e-reader when you can pick up a cheap Acer (Acer Iconia B1 Tablet)/HP (HP TouchPad) low powered tablet for around the same price that has twice the power and does more then just reading books.
At the £30 mark it seems to be fairly priced and is shown by how well it is selling in the UK (the Nook is sold out everywhere here. I could only find one online store that had stock).
The thing I never really understood about e-readers is why they are so expensive to begin with. E-reader's hardware is cheap. Most are specced with 256mb of memory with 800mhz hardTexas Instruments OMAP3621 processor. (I am also pretty sure that e-ink displays are cheaper then LCDs to make.)
They should be cheap and sold at a lost. Sony makes losses on every playstation they sell. They make their money from Blu-ray and Game sales (this isn't an uncommon practice to sell hardware at a loss).
As every e-ready has their own store. The money should be in the book sells, not the hardware.
It's not like people are buying e-readers so they save money on books, so you would think companies would sell the e-readers at a loss so they can get more customers for their online store.
The main reason I decided to get the nook (apart from the cheap price tag) is that it runs Android and can be rooted. I also do like e-ink. Its a lot nicer to read then using a tablet with a backlight. Plus the battery life is insane. E-readers only use power on page turns. While you are on a static page the device draws no power. This gives you around 2 months of usages before needing to charge. And who doesn't like the idea of having over a 1,000 books on one device(33,000 with a SD card).
I was also very impressed at what the E-Ink Pearl technology can do. This video is showing someone playing Wipeout on a PSX emulator (pretty pointless but cool).
What the video is really good at demonstrating is the refresh speed of the Pearl E-Ink. Something e-ink has always struggled with.
