Before I say anything, let me just say I love technology.  Generally I am the first adopter on anything.  I have the HTC Hero phone, I didn’t even wait for the second generation or even the operating system upgrade befor I picked it up.  So, far seems like a decent gamble.

However, there is one piece of new technology I have been soft on from the get go: e-books.

Why?  Price.  (among a number of other good reasons)

Between 250 and 400 dollars you certainly could buy plenty of normal books each year for that.  Honestly, think about it.  You could buy a low end laptop for that much now.  OK, e-books are priced cheaper than regular books but the cost difference only works if you buy 15 books or so a year.

And lets go back to laptops for a second.  Windows 7 and Apple are both thought to be edging toward touch screen laptops with long battery lives.  This would be the ideal kind of device to read books from.  A one-funtion e-book reader purchase right now seems optimistic to me.

And the “Nook, e-book” from Barnes and Noble?  Is it just me?  You say it quickly and it sounds like “The nookie book”?  An unfortunate moniker.

A much better piece of analysis was done by SLATE.

More blogs from me at davehovde.com