DFW said:
Wow! Kindles must have dropped in price. My new nook cost $110.
The cheapest I could find in the UK was 179 when I checked earlier, vs 111 for the Kindle. Just found one Nook for 154, so I'd better revise that down to 43 quid more. I guess someone is just price-gouging on the Nook over here.
DFW said:
I guess you heard wrong. In the US you can convert an ebook all you want. You just can't give copies away. Glad I live in the US if the law is so strict in the UK.
Having looked into it, it used to be illegal in the US ("Digital Millennium Copyright Act") but was overturned in the courts - as is typical over here in the UK (and europe), the government followed suit in making the laws, but not in the removing of them. I'm afraid that I don't tend to keep up to date with US law, in much the same way as you don't keep up with UK law.
Got my Archos 101 today (and committed the cardinal sin of playing BEFORE the battery was fully charged, naturally) and I guess I can live with having to scroll the page I'm looking at - it's my first (modern) touch screen device, so I wasn't sure how easy it would be to have a full-screen page on it... the multi-touch makes zooming a lot easier than I thought it would be too. As long as a device can comfortably see a single column width, then I think that it'd be good enough in any case. I was in the older "it'll be hard to zoom around so best display the whole page" mindset before.
Tried it out on the Merchant PDF sample and I could see the whole page in portrait, but (due to the narrow ratio screen) could only see very small text. In landscape, I can see the full width easily, but obviously need to scroll up and down to read - a mere flick of the finger.
Obviously, those with modern phones and/or tablets will already know this, but my last touch screen device was my iPaq 119 PDA which has a 2.8" screen if I recall correctly and, in comparison to today's devices, was bl***y useless.
Andy and BP: thanks for the help here and in the other (discussion) thread.
(Edit) DFW: just found one supplier (an overstock company) selling the Nook (1st edition) for around 20 less than the Kindle 3rd edition - but that seems to be the exception rather than the rule over here (I suspect they may be importing the Nooks themselves). So apologies on the price aspect.