My trusty Kobo is starting to have problems - it does not always see my Micro SD Card, and after the last update started slowing to a crawl.

I am thinking about getting the Kobo Aura HD, which looks pretty good, is considerably larger, and has a lit screen.

Anyone heard of any problems?

Any other suggestions?

The Aura HD's stats, from the Kobo website:
4 GB of built-in memory, accepts a Micro SD memory card.
Tech Specs

6.8" Custom WXGA+ Pearl E Ink Screen
ClarityScreen+: 265 dpi, 1440 x 1080 resolution
ComfortLight: Built-in front-light technology with coating for durability and even light distribution
Length: 175.7 millimeters, Width: 128.3 millimeters, Edge depth: 7 millimeters, Max Depth: 11.7 millimeters, Weight: 240g
1 GHZ - 25% faster processor than other leading eReaders
4 GB – Option to expand up to 32 GB with a Micro SD card
Wi Fi 802.11 b/g/n and Micro USB
Battery life - Up to 2 months **

** Assumes 30 minutes a day spent reading... yeah... right.... I have a book a day monkey on my back... 30 minutes ain't happenin'.

I already have a Kindle. and it works just fine - I feel no need to upgrade to a Paperwhite. Tried one, loved it, but no need.

This sounds very much like a Kobo version of the Paperwhite.

I've stopped looking at ereaders. I just love it on my phone. Yeah the screen is a little smaller, but I always have it in my pocket. So much of my reading is done when I'm in line at the store or something where I wouldn't have brought a ereader with me.

Got the new reader today... just before having to go to work.

Loaded the new reader, and discovered that I had a bunch of duplicates, and potential duplicates.

The synch is... idiosyncratic. Kobo has their own format, which saves reader preferences as part of the file, but the synch loads the regular e-pubs, with an option to download the KE-Pubs.

Most of the other duplicates are from Baen - I bought a bunch of bundles as well as individual books, and there is a good deal of overlap. (The monthly Baen Bundles rock!)

Page turning is downright peppy, but there is no real quick way to skip through the index, other than by guessing which page of the index the book that you are looking for might be found.

I have an index that is 430 pages long....

The page glow is quite nice.

All in all... I quite like it - I suspect that I will get better at guesstimating what pages a given author might occupy.

I helped a friend inventory her Bones tonight, and am pretty much wiped out, so not much reading tonight....

The Auld Grump

Bones... Good.

Unrelated to Bones, and only semi-related to my new e-reader - Apple lost on that e-book price fixing trial.

Turns out that bragging that you are price fixing does hurt your chances later, when you are trying to prove that you weren't price fixing.

Well played Mr. Jobs, well played.

The Auld Grump, no, I was not a fan of Mr. Jobs... is it that obvious?

And Apple now has a babysitter from the federal government for the next few years....

Also, it did not take long for Amazon to drop the prices on a lot of books.

The Auld Grump

And the good thing about this is what?

Basically what we are telling authors is your 6 months to a year of work is worth less then 8k.

(Average book sells now for under $10. And sells 10k copies. After all the fees are taken out, an author is lucky to get 8 % of that.)

Me I'd rather pay more and have more books, then pay dirt cheap and have authors not be able to keep on writing.

We already have lost most of our physical bookstores thanks to amazon, from what I've heard, amazons drive to the bottom in the ebook price department is going to drive a lot of authors out of writing trade completely if this keeps up.

And what gives you the silly idea that the publishers were paying the authors any more for the hardcovers than they were for those $10 e-books?

Those $10 books on Amazon? The ones that are on the NY Times best seller list?

Amazon pays the publishers $13 for each of those e-books that they sell.

Amazon loses $3 on each of those books.

Amazon is paying them the exact same amount that they do for each of the hardcover books!

And you want really sad?

Authors that sell their books directly through Amazon, either through a collective or on their own accounts? They make more money than the folks selling through the publishing houses. (I direct you to author J. R. Rains in that regard - you should hear what he has to say about $1 e-books. He was as happy as a clam.)

Not just a greater percentage - more money total.

I will now play the world's smallest violin, while listening to the publishers complain about Amazon while those same publishers cut editing staff, drop 'marginal' titles, and cheat their authors.

Oh, and guess what?

Price fixing is illegal, and both the publishing houses and Apple knew this when they conspired to do exactly that.

Only one of the publishing houses decided not to join the Agency model - and Apple threatened to drop them from iBooks unless they also joined with Jobs in bilking the consumer.

How is this good, you ask?

Because Apple is a bunch of crooks, and they got caught.

Steve Jobs thought that he was made of Teflon, and that the courts would not touch him - but then he thought that cancer would not touch him either.

The publishers thought that they would not get caught.

They did not break the law by accident - they broke the law knowing that they were doing so.

Apple has tried to block Steve Jobs biography/autobiography from being used in court three times now, because of things that Jobs was boasting about to his biographer.

It is really hard to claim that you did not do anything illegal while your founder and late CEO is bragging about having done these things, and does so in print.

The publishers, unlike Apple, had the good sense to realize that they had been caught.

Oh, and at the end of the day - Contrary to what you seem to believe - selling more books makes the authors more money than selling fewer books.

The publishing industry is having a hard time right now - in part because print costs have skyrocketed over the last decade.

E-books? Their costs have not changed at all.

To add insult to, well, insult - Harlequin has noticed this! They have added editors specifically for their e-book market! They are starting entire new imprints because of this difference in costs!

At the same time that other publishers are firing editors - Harlequin - the makers of cheesy romances - is expanding!

Baen recognized this more than a decade ago!

So, do not expect me to be filled with sympathy for the poor publisher.

The Auld Grump, why, yes, I do pay attention to the publishing industry, thank you very much.

What he said. Authors were getting screwed by traditional publishing, like musicians were getting screwed by the music industry. Self-publishing, selling through Amazon and other markets, those are Good Things for authors.

Like the Grump, I follow the publishing world, because I am a bibliovore. Though I prefer to read on my Kindle DX or my Nexus tablet (too much page flipping on my phone -- I'm a native speedreader, since before kindergarten, after my mom taught us to read in pre-school).

I to follow the publishing industry and I'm hearing an entirely different story from authors who have tried to go Indy without a big publisher to back them and selling copies in the hundreds not thousands. Without the marketing money of the publishers, and little name recognition they just get lost in the shuffle.

Now you can get name recondition with with clever use of social media, but it takes a very special talent to get the kind of following that is needed.

I understand exactly how authors contracts work. And yes I agree that in most contracts they get the same no matter what form the book sells. The problem is with the current model, as publishers get squeezed its going to roll down to the authors. And they will get less money, or publishers will stop taking chances with new interesting authors and only go with the sure bets.

Like it or not getting publishers to pick up a book is still the best way for a new author to break into the field, and one of the better ways for consumers to remove the load of garbage that you have to sort thorough before you find one good self published work.

As for amazon selling best sellers below cost, that should matter to me why? That's their marketing way of getting more people to log onto their site. Every business does that, the sunk cost is factored into their yearly budget in order to sell more hardware and other items.

But it does set the consumer expectation that books should only be worth a max of $9.99.

And that makes it hard for even new authors who are trying to go the self publish route. A struggling author who is just starting out and may only sell a few hundred copies of an ebook, the difference between 9.99 and 12.99 is huge.

Now before I go any farther, let me just say I'm not defending the publishers and apples conduct here. Rather just pointing out the problems with the behavior that this case will now allow amazon to conduct again.

Maybe it's the fact that I only have the time to read maybe 10-12 books a year and know a number authors who are struggling to make it, but to me paying a few dollars more for a good book is well worth the price. Add to that my burning hatred of amazon (who destroyed not only the local bookstore, a good number of the FLGS, treat workers like crap, steal like bandets from kickstarter, and engages in all manner of underhanded business behavior) but I don't feel that the remedy put in place is really a good solution to the problem. It will simply allow amazon to return to the problem behavior that started this whole mess, and is good for nobody execpt amazon long term.

I also know authors, and print companies, and indy publishers, and small publishers that go through larger companies to get their books out. I used to work for an indie publisher. (The Companions Inc. Bath, Maine....)

And everything that you have named is being done by the publishers.

But, bottom line?

It has now been shown that five major publishers are willing to break the law for increased profits.

That they knew that they were breaking the law.

And that they did it anyway.

In the words of Judge Roy Bean 'Let them hang.'

They broke the law and got caught.
They routinely screw over their authors.
They routinely screw over their consumers.
They routinely screw over their editors.

Hell, two of those publishers are on record as wanting libraries to stop loaning books to people - that libraries are cutting into their bottom lines! (Doubleday himself is one of them.)
My sympathies should be with them, why?

Did you know that this whole mess started as a low level investigation into Amazon? They found that Amazon wasn't breaking the law. They were not forcing publishers to take a smaller cut. They were not forcing retailers to take a smaller cut.

They were paying full price for books, even when they discounted them.

Apple was forcing retailers to take a smaller cut - with Jobs boasting his fool head off about it. (That whole 'Most Favored Nation clause.)

The publishers were - and leaving a trail of e-mails and memos showing that they knew exactly what they were doing.

Amazon... was not.

Amazon even had messages and memos on record of advising publishers how to increase sales without breaking the law. Advising them that e-publishing is a growth market, and should be encouraged.

The publishers broke the law anyway.

Amazon's view is simple -
Print is a shrinking market.
E-publishing is a growth market.
Print has high overhead costs.
E-publishing has low overhead costs.

Expanding e-book sales means that the publishers get a bigger return on investment in a growth sector - which will continue to grow.

Amazon is trying to grow an entire new market.

The publishers complain that e-book sales are linked to a particular reader - but it was the publishers that insisted on DRM - not Amazon!
Amazon's solution was to suggest dropping DRM - but most of the publishers do not like that... despite Amazon pointing out that MP3 sales skyrocketed when DRM was removed..
And it is worth noting that most of Amazons arguments are identical to those used by Apple in regards to DRM and iTunes. (Steve Jobs described DRM as 'a security blanket'.)

Apple stopped following its own advice, mostly because they wanted a stranglehold on the new market.

They went into this hoping to become a defacto monopoly.

To do this they tried to paint Amazon as a defacto monopoly - in the face of evidence and a DoJ investigation to the contrary.

In this instance, my sympathies are with Amazon - the publishers were caught breaking the law, and deserve what they are getting.

The publishers are trying to hold on to a broken publishing, sales, and distribution model, and deserve what they are getting.

Why should my sympathies be with either Apple or the publishers?

There are publishers that have shown that you do not need to screw the consumer -
Let us look at Baen -
No DRM, right from the start. The published view by Jim Baen himself in the matter of folks letting friends read the e-books was 'and that's different from them loaning a regular book, how?' and then went on at length that part of the joy of books is loaning them to fellow readers - and that he did so as well.
Distribution from their website - they have sold e-books on the Baen website since before there were e-readers. (They sell more e-books than they sell books to Canada.)
Sufficient editors - they can take a risk on new authors. (Here is where most publishers are falling down. Most are cutting editorial staff.)

Let us look at Harlequin - which is hiring new editorial staff!
Heck, they are branching out into new markets with imprints for SF, fantasy, and even horror.
They are doing an entire series of imprints as digital only - and hiring editors to handle them.

Unlike the Big Five Harlequin recognizes the fact that inherent costs are much lower, and that prices can be low accordingly.
More importantly, that much of the inherent risk of taking on a new author is largely removed - you do not need to pay for an entire print run to test the sales.
There is nothing preventing a print run for a successful e-book, or the author growing from their e-book imprints into print.

In both of those the key is having sufficient editors - yes, it is hard to break into the market. But not having enough editors is a big chunk of why.

My recommendation is that if you want to break into writing... get a business card from one of the editors at Baen or Harlequin. Include it with your submission.

Because most editors at the main publishers just do not have time to look at the slush pile.

The Auld Grump

I had a nice long conversation tonight with a couple of writers - both of them publish both through the same mainstream publisher and reprint their back catalog through a writer's co-operative indie press.

The reason that their back catalog is being published by the co-op instead of their mainstream publisher?

Their main publisher wanted to change the terms for any books sold through electronic media - e-books, PDFs, etc. Giving the writers a smaller cut even though the publisher was being paid the exact same amount, with a much lower production cost.

Amazon, on the other hand, is giving them the exact same amount on the e-books as for the print versions - and even encouraged dropping the prices while still paying the writers the same amount.

One writes a mystery series set in Vermont, the other a mystery series set in Alaska.

My sympathies were already with Amazon in this - but having heard from writers now... yeah, Amazon all the way - they will likely sell fewer books through the indie publisher (though both have now had books that were plugged through Amazon's 'Daily Deals'), but it is worth it for not having to deal with publishing companies that have reduced their editing staff and wish to take a bigger bite from the e-book and back catalog royalties.

The Auld Grump - if I am sounding cranky then you should have heard the authors - they were cranky....

You are normally cranky...

I am liking the iPad... I'm using it right now.

As a matter of principle I try to buy locally even at a loss. (I may torrent the equivalent PDFs after the fact.)

I rarely use Amazon. I find the selection is poor and expensive, I use TheBookDepository.

Grumpiness aside I just bought an iPad Air to read books, read PDFs, synth music, and touch up renders. [I bought a few magazines from newsstand but I will likely never do that again. The price is right DRM and all ($2-6). But newsstand literally shits itself when network connectivity is poor. You know, like, if you're waiting at the hospital and have nothing to do but read a digital magazine. I may continue the pay the low prices but more than likely I will be downloading illegitimate PDFs because Adobe actually works.]

I just bought a PDF book at full price because it was non-DRM and a book I was looking for. DRM and full price and that would be a 'no' from me.


I think the print industry is under pressure from a lot more sources. Competition from movies, tv, video, and music. There is also literally an explosion of different things to see and do out there.

Businesses are facing incredible pressure to compete on a global market. Lordy knows how many Chinese are out there and willing to do it for less. I moved a manufacturing plant from Calgary, to Alabama, to Mexico, to Tiawan. All to chase lower wages for 5 minutes on the manufacturing line.

I think the trend of incredibly cheap consumer goods will reverse. China has cancelled its one child policy since it no longer drives growth in their economy. That means growth will have to come from increased wages. And that means jobs will come back to the West. And that means the cost of goods and services will have to go up. A lot.

I wonder what that means for the print industry...

I am sorry to say that the print industry is likely going to take a lot of damage.

Archer Mayor was telling us that the number of editors has dropped to less than a quarter of the number that they had in 2008.

And that the publishers are trying to print only the books that will sell.

There are exceptions - Gollancz in the UK is keeping their editors, and as a result are keeping their authors, in spite of being in love with DRM (this is from Charles Stross).

In the United States, Harlequin is expanding into the e-book market. Adding editors and e-only titles to their offerings. (And bragging about it - and it is something worth bragging about.)

Baen... has lost direction, a bit, since Jim Baen died. The prices of their e-books have gone up, and their free library has shrunk - in a bid to please Amazon and other e-tailers.

Angry Robot... has or had a program where folks that bought their print book from an independent bookstore could get the e-book version for free.

Amazon is opening for self publishing. (Both Mayor and Stabenow factored that in when creating their collective.) I... have had the dubious pleasure of reading a book that may soon appear on Amazon. (Hopefully she took my critique in stride - she wrote a steampunk romance, and I suggested that she go and read some history and background on the period.)

And, like Angry Robot, they have begun discounting the e-books on purchase of the print volumes. (And of audio versions for folks that have bought the Kindle versions.)

It is worth noting that an investigation into Amazon revealed no illegal dealings - the same is not true for Apple.

But print... ink on paper print... is in for a hard time. Their retail and distribution model is broken for the current economy.

Apple's role in the price fixing has made me decide never to deal with them - they knew that what they were doing was against the law, and did it anyway.

Even that was not the deciding factor though - it was the fact that they used extortion to bring the dissenting publisher in line with their plans. In short, they resorted to racketeering.

And Jobs, bless his worm ridden heart, bragged about it.

So, done with Apple. I do not deal with crooks.

Mind you, that is a small matter - I have not bought any music from iTunes in over a decade, my iPod Classic is the only Apple product that I own, and I have owned it for years.

It is very easy to continue not buying their products.

The Book Depository, on the other hand, look to be good people. If most of my reading were not on my Kobo these days then I would be buying most of my books from them as well. (An exception is on Pathfinder rule books - I typically get them through either Amazon or direct from Paizo.)

*EDIT* For the record - my roommate has a Kindle Paperwhite... danged nice e-reader.

The Auld Grump

I think it's a many fold issue. On one hand there are ever more obscure subjects to get books on and ever more competition for that entertainment(?) dollar.

A few years ago I heard some music that I really liked. (Neurotic Fish) Only it was old... It was just never carried in the main stream. It seems that a lot of my interests are way off mainstream.

Some days I feel like Mr Toad.


I think that what is happening to publishing is a combination of market fragmentation and competition. On top of that consumers have set such high expectations for low prices. It's a Walmart World.

Technology has finally overtaken the book industry. Instead of accepting the implications of that, the big traditional players are trying to hang on to their old revenue and business models and several of the new players (looking at you Apple) are trying to emulate those older and seemingly wealthier ways.

Right now, the editors (notably the salaried ones - which is most of them) are casualties of that mess. Editing work is and will still be needed, but until editors figure out how to transition from the job market to the expert skills for hire market many of them will change jobs, struggle, or take early retirement.

The book industry has a way to go yet, and most of the old publishing names will disappear before the transition is complete. DriveThruRPG is a much better example of the future of the ebook market than the big name players (even Amazon is still far from the openness and ease for both buyers and sellers that DriveThruRPG provides).

eReaders have come a long way, but are still failing at basic interoperability - you still can't buy whatever ebook you want, from wherever you want, and have it load seamlessly onto your device. And moving eBooks seamlessly between devices, forget it. It will take at minimum one more evolution of reader software and/or open DRM standards before epublishing achieves the ease of use and universality for which it is destined.

Pricing will go the way of the phone call. It's no coincidence that telephony revenues and profits have risen as call prices have decreased. Just like a phone calls, the incremental cost of accessing a copy of an ebook is negligible - which means that any additional overhead between creation and consumption is redundant and therefore will be elimited.

The biggest difference between ebooks and phone calls is that the traditional book format normally takes several hours to consume, rather than minutes or second for a phone call. This sets a practical limit on the market volume for ebooks that is much lower than for phone calls and will mean a correspondingly higher floor price. That floor price will be set by the cost to produce (i.e. fund the creators, all of them) and that will still be a long way below the current market price for ebooks.

Also expect ebook pricing to start to mirror the model used for movies and electronic games, with prices dropping steadily as newer ebooks come on the market. Even trilogies, and other series which have the pre-requisite of reading the earlier book(s), will see the earlier ebooks in the series drop rapidly in price as an incentive for readers to purchase the latest in the series at the new release price.

TLDR: The reformation of the publishing industry is still in its early days. Expect significant improvements in ease of use and interoperability of ebooks and eReaders. Expect ebook prices to drop by half or more, and expect ebook prices to become more dynamic with faster decline after release.

(These brazen prophesies brought to you from the Book of Zenguy, only $2.99 at eBooksForAll.com )

Over the years I have found myself more and more reading books and newspapers in electronic form. A lot of the ebooks I have purchased or downloaded have been purchased before in regular print form.

I started reading ebooks when I found the that had some manuscripts I was interested in reading, and that had a lot of books that I wanted or had that could be saved as ebooks. I do still purchase both printed books and ebooks. I even sometimes purchase the print version of ebooks that I have acquired for free.

The first ebook "reader" I used was a Palm Vx, I now have a Kindle Second Generation with the keyboard. It does what I want which is read ebooks in various formats, there is no need to surf the web or play games.

My one big complaint about ebooks and electronic versions of magazines and newspapers is the bad editing. The people in charge need to hammer it in that editing is not just sending something through a spell checker. Yes the words will be spelled correctly, but that does not mean the words are correct. I have seen that situation crop up constantly.

The pricing of ebooks is sometimes baffling. It is kind of suspicious when an ebook is more expensive than the print version. I bought an ebook a few months ago for $14.11 that I thought was a novel but turned out to be nothing more than a longish short story.

Some things that came out during the Apple trial -

Amazon actually pushed for an open format, it was the publishers that wanted the e-books locked to a single reader.

The publishers then realized that by locking the e-books to a single reader they gave the e-book seller (Amazon) too much leverage.

They never bothered asking Amazon to open the format. (Until afterwards - when they discovered that Amazon is quite willing to sell books without DRM, in spite of Amazon telling them earlier that they should sell books without DRM. Amazon actually held to what they had said.)

Apple... actually came closer to emulating the magazine market than traditional book selling - what Paizo has called 'the evil, organized crime controlled magazine market'.

Amazon learned from the MP3 market - and wanted the same system for the e-book market. (I wish that I could find a link to the Amazon statement during the Apple price fixing trial - but it came down to 'open it up, you'll sell more'.)

But publishers seem bound and determined to make every single one of the mistakes that the music industry made.

Never be afraid to let other people make the mistakes for you - the publishers had a chance to learn from the mistakes that the music industry made, but instead they are making all of those same mistakes.

Gamezone has made a similar comment in regard to the Anniversary Heroquest, as to why the miniatures are going to be useable for regular games as well as Heroquest - 'that was a mistake that we didn't have to make' was what they had to say about other games using a different scale for their board games than for their wargames and RPGs. (Mutant Chronicles and Inquisitor, anyone?)

There are exceptions in the publishing industry - Jim Baen and Eric Flint avoided that pit trap with the Baen ebooks. (Jim Baen publicly stating that you should be able to loan your ebooks to other people. That it should be no different than loaning a paperback.) But Baen has been selling ebooks for a long time.

E-books will never have the same joy as walking through a bookstore, and maybe finding something that looks interesting, that you would never have gotten if you had not seen it in the store. People do judge books by their covers - that's why they have those pretty pictures on them. And I have enjoyed enough books that I purchased because the cover looked interesting to disregard that adage, at least when the cover is attractive.

I know several people with Kindle Paperwhites - including my roommate.

The front end for buying books is a hell of a lot more attractive on the Kindle than on my Kobo - I like the ePub format better than Mobi, but Amazon does a lot better with their front end. It is obvious that they are putting an effort into making ebook buying easy and pleasurable.

My roommate got one with the 'special offers' (Spam) turned off. And he is happy with it.

Jon got one with the 'Special Offers', then later spent the $25 to turn the special offers off. (Then became disgruntled because he discovered that he missed the special offers - and there was no way to turn them back on. People are weird.)

Both have bought books through the front end of the Kindle, and go through the 'Daily Deals', well, daily. So Amazon does encourage impulse buying, while Kobo and Sony have a problem with that. (I do not know about the Nook - I gave up on them when I discovered that B&N put a second layer of DRM on the epub, so that it would work only on a Nook. Buying epub from Sony or Kobo just has the single layer of DRM, so that it is linked to a specific user, not a specific brand of e-reader.

Still not as good as a bookstore, but better than most e-readers.

I generally go into my Kobo and buy what I want - already knowing what I want, with almost no impulse buying.

When I break down and buy a Paperwhite, it will be because of the impulse buying....

The Auld Grump

The first ebook reader I tried to use was a Fossil Wrist PDA. Of course my eyes were much better then.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_Wrist_PDA

I am of the opinion that ebook readers are going to go the way of the Dodo. Same as PDAs and Cellphones. (Ever try to buy a cell phone that isn't a smart phone? You gotta look hard.)

My wife has a Sony ebook reader but she never uses it. I even managed torrent in some books she wanted, but she still won't use it.

I think that uni-task devices tend to fall by the way side;
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/0 ... 62322.html
Considering that iPad mini is 2 to 3X as much as a kindle and its still outselling selling.

That may be why there's an App for that. (I may just give this a try... after listening to you Grumple, Grump.)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1000490441

It is also worth noting that Apple makes it as hard as they possibly can to use Kindle with an iPad. They deliberately (and as a matter of record) crippled the ability to buy Kindle books through the app. Worth looking up, if you have the time. (Apple are not the 'good guys' - Jobs... well, I can't really say anything nice about the man that does not involve Pixar.)

My solution is to not bother with iPads. But then I really do not think that tablets are worth the money - yet. I would be more likely to get a Netbook or even a Chromebook than any tablet. I type better with my fingers than with my thumbs.... Plus, it seems like Chromebooks are cheaper than most comparable tablets. (And have keyboards.)

I won a Cruz Velocity tablet, once upon a time - tried it, and gave it away. I am really not a tablet fan. (Yes, tablets have come a long way since then - but not yet far enough for me.)

For me (and I am speaking only for me) an e-reader is preferable to a tablet. It fits my needs better.

For folks that like tablets then it is a no brainer, since you already have the tablet then you might as well use it as a reader.

The flip side - when my roommate got his Paperwhite he also got a Fire (a tablet in all but name). The problem is that the battery life is short. So, it lives next to his bed, plugged into an adapter at all times. By comparison, both my Kobo and his Paperwhite can go for a week without recharging.

The things that a tablet can do better than a reader... typically my laptop does it better still, and can connect to my Steam account, my Kindle account, and the Amazon Cloud for my music.

The Auld Grump - but, again, I can only speak for myself - I never bothered with a PDA, nor yet a smartphone. (I hate cell phones in general - when I am away from the phone then I want to be away from the damned phone!)

I'm not actually an Apple fan. I started using iTunes and iPod because they have the patent on Genre/Artist/Album/Track and that is how my music is stored.

Frankly many of their built in apps are just obnoxious (read: annoyingly un-deletable). Re-read my comments on Newsstand shitting bricks, but only if you desperately need to use it. Make no mistake, I will steal pdfs rather than put up with that.

I use evil Apple in the same way that I use evil Microsoft. I need it for the software and the general usefulness.

If you're a power user like me, Apple is a lot of headaches. To much auto-magic which frankly has come full circle. Apple products are not simple to use, and the enable button which says something is enabled, doesn't. For instance, you cannot synchronize contacts between Apple products. No matter how much you enable that, and Apple says, "Yup! Done!". It will never work. (It software terms, that is a sin. Its like bouncing a check. Its grossly incompetent.)

The full circle part is obvious. Apple doesn't know how to write documentation or manuals. Its impossible to guess where to find information or discern what is going on. Old school procedural documentation would be a real asset. That's the stuff everyone else knows how to write.

Heh, at this point I think that Microsoft may be the lesser of two evils. (With the exception of their delusion that Windows can do no wrong... '96, ME, Vista, and 8 to the contrary....)

iTunes is the only piece of Apple software that I use, and that because of iTunes works so well with the iPod. (And re: your sorting preference - I am afraid that I can only say 'Me too'. Grrr....)

And I also agree wholeheartedly in regards to the auto-magic. It drives me crazy in Windows 7, and I gather is worse in 8. I do not want the computer to over rule my choices, dammit!

I gather that the health of Barnes & Noble doesn't look that good right now. (But they have recontinued the color Nook, after announcing that they were discontinuing it.)

Pretty much every Nook that belongs to anybody that I know has been jailbroken.

The Auld Grump