People in Europe pay a third what we pay for internet and their speeds are a lot faster.
Really? When I lived in Europe I paid a little more for it than I do now (a lot more if you divide up the $160 installation cost I had to pay over the time period I had it), and the speed was painful. I know not every European country will be the same, but in general, is it really cheaper and faster? Bingo? YIYF? Leonardo? Adywan? Anyone else from Europe that I left out, you guys care to confirm this?
I pay $35 a month for a supposedly "up to 10mbps" connection (usually clocks at about 3 -7mbps when I test it). If what Janskeet is saying is true, then that means you guys pay little more than $10 a month for a faster than 10mbps connection. I find that hard to swallow.
If I want to read about something or lookup something, I usually turn to the internet and that usually more than satisfies what I wanted to read. In the last 5 years the internet has really gotten diverse enough to feed most people's reading needs. It still is nice to have a book to read in bed though.
For information maybe, but you will still find more solid sources in real books, and literature is an entirely different matter. Unless you are stealing them, you still have to pay to read John Grisham's latest masterpiece in repetitive, meaningless story telling, or J. K. Rowling's latest hacked together piece of tripe. Sure, I can wiki "Christopher Hitchens" and read all about his life for free, but if I really want that deep insight into his life and mind that I could get from reading his autobiography, then I'd need to pay for an ebook copy of Hitch-22 or purchase a hard copy or check one out from the local library. Not sure if that really qualifies as serving "most people's reading needs"... unless of course you are talking about people buying books from amazon, then I'd probably have to concur.
Even if I did find something I liked, I would rarely buy it there because bookstores sell at premium retail prices and even with discounts are still cheaper online.
And that is exactly why Border's is going under. I do the same. I love spending time in B&N, Borders, Books-A-Million, and just about any other brick and mortar bookseller. I love books, and I love being able to pick them up and thumb through them, read a few pages, and decide whether it is worth my time and effort to purchase and read. Sadly for those bookstores, everybody loves a bargain... which to me personally usually equates to the brick and mortar store helping me make my decision by presenting the books to me tangibly and allowing me to spend some time reading it in a comfortable chair, just so I can return it to a shelf, go home, and log onto an online retailer and buy it for usually no more than 20-40% off the cover price.
Times they are A-changing, and sadly bookstores look as if they will be a casualty of this. Overhead costs are just too high to have a massive store filled with enough books to cover a broad range of interests and still be able to compete with something like amazon, which allows users to buy new, used, just released to out of print and anything that falls in between, and just about any book they could possible want in just about any language it has ever been published in.
Still sad to see them having trouble.