What am I doing making duplicates?  :-[

I have a free offer for Safari for a 45 day trial with Effective C#... how is it?  I've always brushed it off because I can't see renting books.  But looking at it closer, I guess it would make sense.  I have so many outdated books because of the rate of technology changing, so maybe I need to change my view of things.  Can you only see them on the website?  So can you use them if you're offline?

-wraith808 (June 09, 2011, 10:46 AM)

I only used it briefly and it was through membership in the IEEE Computer society that gave limited access.  I don't recall it having the download tokens or any way to do offline at that time, not sure how much of the books got cached.  Also, I never did get to try the mobile site, so I only used it through Firefox, where it worked pretty well.  The selection of books was a subset of the full library which made finding the books I wanted hit or miss, and oddly they didn't show the books that were in the library but not available in my plan.

The way it works can be a bit confusing for an individual:
1) You get 10 slots.
2) You can preview parts of a book but to access the full content you have to place it in a slot.
3) You cannot remove the book from that slot until 30 days have passed.
So it seems more conducive to people that will read the book cover to cover, and less so for someone using it as an actual reference library.

Given all that it was good for how little I used it, and I can recommend giving it a try.  :P

I haven't renewed my IEEE membership and Safari is the only thing I miss, but I don't feel I'd ever use my money's worth with the 10-slot plan.  I'd be willing to pay $120/year for a 3-5 slot plan, even if it meant losing the Video content, and I think that would meet my usage better.

What would be truly amazing is if they adopted an à la carte model where you pay a small monthly subscription for 1-slot and can at any time add/remove more slots for an additional fee, or pay more to add the Video/Rough Cuts/etc. offerings.  Seems I'm doing a lot of dreaming today.  :-[

At first, I was buying because that was the format I already had- but now, comparing to Amazon, it seems that in *every* case, the price at B&N is quite a bit higher than the price at Amazon for the digital formats- even approaching hardcopy prices.  So I'm having a bit of a crisis in e-reading right now. :(

-wraith808 (June 08, 2011, 07:30 AM)

For the books I've been buying recently the prices between the two are in parity, though admittedly I have noticed that in many other cases B&N prices tend to be a little more.  And often reference books are moronically priced (on both stores) - for a while I didn't believe anyone at Wrox had a brain because their e-books were only available at prices higher than the dead tree versions' list-prices and came with stupid restrictions on number of downloads and devices.

Personally, the difference has always been acceptable to me since B&N are selling me a less restrictive, but still stupid, DRM format.  My problem with the Kindle has always been their proprietary format platform lock-in.

That said, I find the B&N situation extremely frustrating since it should mean they are in competition with the Sony and Google bookstores which use the same format, and I think that should drive prices down.  Though, I imagine part of the problem is their contracts all ensure they get the lowest price and Amazon can afford to take a bigger loss.

However, with certain screen protectors, I can alleviate most of the glare issues for her.

-Josh (June 08, 2011, 07:48 AM)

I've yet to find a solution that I like, which is why if outdoor reading were a requirement I couldn't recommend anything other than e-ink.

While the PDMI is OK, I do not like having to buy custom cables to do basic things.

-Josh (June 08, 2011, 07:48 AM)

I'm not sure I'd have bought the Galaxy Tab myself because of this exact reason. There were a lot of people at IO that were disappointed to discover nothing but the PDMI.

I like that it means a thinner and lighter device but feel the least they could have done was thrown in the USB adapter. Note that they do include a USB male-A to PDMI cable for charging/syncing - I wonder if it would at all be possible to create a USB crossover cable?

The only reason I might hold off is for the quad core tablets coming out shortly. But, I am likely going to bite the bullet and buy her one as her laptop screen is just about shot.

-Josh (June 08, 2011, 07:48 AM)

Completely understandable, I suffer from technolust so I doubt I could have taken my own advice and made it through this summer.