of kids want an iPad
The Nielsen Company presented a cadre of individuals with a list of nice, shiny gadgets and let them cross off anything and everything they'd like to buy in the next six months, and 31 percent of kids 6-12 picked the iPad as one of them.
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The digital age will destroy certain publishers because lets face it, nobody needs a grant to write a mass market romance novel. Shit can be written for free, and consumed for nearly free. The only publishers this will truly effect are specialty ones or ones that produce traditionally expensive works. I think a great example is Mathematics textbooks. Why is a math book $100? The publishers claim it takes years to write and is expensive to publish, and often doesn't sell in great quantities... well, why not make a great math textbook, offer it for free and let any school use it via something like google books? Well for one, publishers try and destroy that at the school district level, by purposefully making schools buy packages so that not getting certain books that could be had for free has little financial benefit. This whole situation would go away if an author could just write something, and publish it via an itunes like app store, where there was a short approval process, just to make sure the book wasn't a copy of another work. Allow items to be reviewed and flagged but require real full names on every review so competitors and other authors can't try and bad review a better product out of competition like on amazon. It's silly, I really hope Google crushes all this bullshit, because that's what it is.
When will we stop associating free with good?
Is something wrong with you?
I think you're forgetting the fact that labor is hardly ever free. People work for hours spending time creating, editing, illustrating, outlining, and everything else associated with the contents of a book. I think they deserve compensation for their craft.
Also, Google isn't exactly as nice as they always appear. Google is more closer to Big Brother than the other companies in knowing and analyzing your data, which is used for Google's benefit more than the user.