You have that backwards. If their drivers are inadvertantly violating a patent owned by Joe's Patent Trolls, Inc, then making the drivers open source makes that violation much easier to spot.

Patents are a huge disincentive to releasing open source drivers. Another issue the company I worked for had was hardware bugs, because having to put bizarre workarounds in closed source drivers was no big deal, but a bit embarrassing in open source.

And what do you think profit margins are for console components?

How long does it take when you get to the battery station in Nowheresville and they've run out of batteries?

And the "intrepid imaginaut" can't imagine a world where people, I don't know, have a different experience?

What makes you think I haven't tried something else? I've got a perfectly good Kindle right here. It's fine...well designed, well made, nice piece of hardware...but I /prefer/

(there's the key word, everybody)

the utility of an LCD (LED OLED whateverthehell) tablet.

The farce here is that one person somewhere thinks they've got some kind of read about Immutable Truths of How Reading Works, and that's just silly. You don't. I don't. GP doesn't. It will be OK.

You realise that Amazon owns Createspace, which is one of the largest PoD suppliers in the world right now?

So an alleged price-fixing cartel between Apple and trade publishers shows Amazon has an e-book monopoly?

Does not compute, Will Robinson.

"the simple reality is that you can't read books or even lengthy texts as easily from a luminescent monitor as from an e-ink display."

Simply not true. I can, and do, and your wishing won't stop me.

"but you didn't have people selling their book collections when laptops became common"

That's a form factor thing, not a backlit screen thing.

eink/epaper is great. I happen to prefer the flexibility of an LCD. Neither preference should get you all hot n' bothered, because it's just that: A preference. For /my/ use case, an LCD is superior. For /your/ use case, do whatever the hell you want. It'll be OK.

To be fair, that may not be B&N's fault. If you read author blogs on the web, you'll find a number saying 'my book series died because by the time I finished book 4 the publisher had let book 1 go out of print and wouldn't reprint it, so sales were dismal. Who's going to start reading a series where the first book is unavailable?'

Publishing and book selling seems to be a completely brain-dead industry.

Through a caring, loving, nurturing, trade publisher, the author typically gets 85% of 25% of 70% of the e-book cover price, or about 15% royalties once everyone else has sucked out their cut. Through the EVIL AMAZON MONOPOLY, they generally get at least 35%, or 70% if the book is priced between $2.99 and $9.99.

Late last year I saw a few complaints online along the lines of 'I went to B&N before Christmas to buy books as presents, but they don't seem to sell them any more.'

Abandoning your core market in the hope of picking up a new one is rarely a good business plan.

Probably because Amazon don't have one. They own far less of the e-book market now than they did a couple of years ago, and B&N's share has been falling in that time.

I sell e-books through various stores, and Apple and Kobo account for about as many sales as Amazon. B&N sells pretty much none.

The people who claim everyone wants to run 3D games and video conferencing in their web browers might want to consider that comment.

I've certainly never, ever met anyone who does, though i'm sure they exist. I see no reason why this crap should be imposed on everyone just for a tiny few who think running Quake in Firefox is a really good idea.

Thirty years ago, the old-timers used to call that 'bloat'.

I have absolutely no use for 3D gaming or video conferencing in my web brower, and I don't plan to be using it to run slow, ugly 'web apps'. Is there an option to turn all that crap off?

But fixing bugs is boring.