2010-06-11 18:25:00
I sincerely have the utmost faith in digital content delivery. Over the past year we've seen a huge rise in sales of e-readers, which is a great step forward. But we're not there yet! Call me an Apple fanboy if you will, but I do believe the iPad is the next step and who knows what the future will bring after that?! I hear good things about e-ink color screens!
Either way, those things are simply used to carry and present the important bit: content. And how does it get on there? Delivery through the Internet! So far it's working wonderfully on my iPhone.
I've been using Comixology's Comics to both purchase and consume comic books. The buying process couldn't be simpler and IMO pricing is very fair. Most comics ring in at 0.79 euros, with the more popular Marvel comics running 1.59 euros. Choose comic, enter password, download, read. It's wonderfully easy and the Comics app has opened my eyes to a lot of new comics. One of my new favorites is Fearless Dawn.
On a more serious note I'm loving PressReader, which gives you access to 1000+ international news papers. And I don't mean an aggregation of their online content, but the actual full PDFs of each news paper. The application itself is free and comes with seven free issues of any paper of your choosing. The economy subscription to PressReader runs $9.95 and gives you access to 31 issues each month, allowing you to mix and match any papers you would like. There are also more expensive subs, or you can pay as you go at $0.99 per paper.
The economy sub is actually cheaper than most of the online-only subscriptions to dutch news papers. PR gives access to the Volkskrant and the NRC, both of which have a more expensive online-only sub. Only NRC runs cheaper, but only if you pay per-year instead of per-month. Either way, I love reading the paper through PR and assume that it'll only be nicer on the much bigger iPad screen.
Personally I'm sold on on-demand content delivery through the Internet.
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Posted by Thomas
Hey Jeff!
Wow! How've you been? Hope you're holding up well :)
I'll agree with you on the basic e-readers: they're a nice first step, and they had me doubting about getting one, but they don't have me sold. The iPad actually has me convinced that I'll be getting one because it gets so many things right. I'm not saying it's perfect, far from it, but it is definitely the first device that makes me say: good enough.
I haven't tried buying books yet, but comics and news papers and music work fine. The price is right in all cases. I've heard about books being a tad expensive, though supposedly that's also down to the publishers.
All content, with exception of "borrowed" blogpost images, or unless otherwise indicated, is copyright of Tess Sluijter. The character Kilala the cat-demon is copyright of Rumiko Takahashi and used here without permission.
2010-06-11 23:19:00
Posted by jeffx
You're an Apple fanboy!
I love the idea of digital content delivery. I'm just not sold on the implementations yet. I'm really just talking about books and video because for music I'm hooked.
I've yet to see the e-book reader that has convinced me. The price of the book is still to large. When questioning the sales guy they all use the "you can carry 10,000 books" selling point. Not the best selling point.
Oh....excluding the iPad....it has more functionality. And it also makes me drool.