The Book vs. The Kindle
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If I could carry around all of my kindle books and a pdf of my homework assignments and free e-books found online etc etc I would be much more interested in buying a kindle.
Also, I never actually read the Terms & Agreements for services, but for the kindle it apparently does matter because Amazon is remotely deleting books that people have legitimately purchased. There is another post on HN with an article about it. If Amazon could delete things on my Kindle I would never get one and stick to the good old paper versions.
New kindle supports pdf (and anything you can translate into pdf).
Amazon is remotely deleting books that people have legitimately purchased
If you defined "legitimately" as "gave money for", yes. Legally, no. Just because I pay money and think a transaction is legal doesn't make it so.
That is true. However, that is again Amazon's fault because they sold him the book without having the rights to do so. Instead of admitting their mistake and using excellent customer service to fix the problem they just deleted the book without any thought for the customer. They could have sent him a paper copy without him even asking, notified him before the deletion so he could save his notes and/or dealt with the publisher directly and obtained the rights to avoid the whole situation.
Just as digital music (arguably) has not hurt record sales, it has (again arguably) had its toll on bricks and mortar music stores. It is a way of life, and love it or hate it, it is inevitable.
A paperback is lightweight, cheap, durable and independent of other resources. Most importantly, a book as an experience is a long, drawn out affair. Books take hours to enjoy, so it's of little importance how many I can carry at a time.
Music/movies have the opposite effect ~ they are shorter durations of entertainment, so the more I can carry, the more I can enjoy the experience. The major advantage of digital music is that I can carry my whole library with me in my pocket. Even if I could do this with my bookcase, there is little reason for me to do so. This defeats one of the major advantages of kindle.
I don't disagree with anything you say, but I don't think the death of the book will happen any time in our lifetime, or our children's lifetime to be honest.
I hear you, but that doesn't apply to all the books I own. If I could swap at no cost to me all my physical books with idealised e-books (say on a 100% faithful reproduction DRM-free e-reader), I would probably only keep physical copies of 10% of my hoard.