What's inside the evrit reader?

[Nadav Har'El]

On Sun, May 30, 2010, Hetz Ben Hamo wrote about "Re: What's inside the evrit reader?":
> IMHO I wouldn't recommend such a device until the price drops and we'll see
> some competing products. There are competing products who are IIRC cheaper.
> The books that Steimatzky will sells are fully DRM protected, you cannot
> "loan" to anyone and vice-versa.

All of this would be fine if their business model was that of a library.
After all, people don't normally check out books from a library and go to
loan ("sublet") them to other people, and nobody would care if his rented
book has any DRM on it - after all the all point of the eink display is that
it will be much more convenient to read a book on it, not on a general-purpose
computer.

But this is NOT their business-model. While they continue to pretend to be
*selling* books for 44 shekels each, while not actually selling you all the
normal rights you'd expect - I consider such a device worthless.
Even if instead of 1400 shekels it would cost 400 shekels (and it won't,
I don't see why everyone here is hoping for its price to significantly drop -
they'll just have a new model that costs the same....)

I've been accumulating books for 35 years now, and CDs for 25 years now,
and they are all still usable, for me and my family (and/or anyone I might
choose to give them to). If they guarantee that I could do the same with
ebooks that I "buy" from them, I'll agree to buy from them. Otherwise, this
is not buying, it's renting, and I want to pay the much lower book-rental
prices on the market (last time I checked, this was known as a "library", and
didn't cost 44 shekels every time you checked out a book.)

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |       Sunday, May 30 2010, 17 Sivan 5770
nyh at math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |I considered atheism but there weren't
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |enough holidays.