Laura Donovan's Blog

For $600-$700, you can get an iPhone without a 2-year contract bind. The new phones will still be bound to AT&T, however, so other cellular carriers won’t work “unless [the phones] are modified.”

The new plan seems like a deceptive advancement. No one can really get their money’s worth, especially since they’ll be trapped into using AT&T over other reliable carriers such as Verizon, T-Mobile, etc. Apple will likely launch a newer version of the iPhone this summer, so it makes sense to wait and see if the iPhones make any further advancements, anyway.

Sony’s e-book reading device will provide 500,000 unprotected by copyright, free books. This product will still be below the Kindle, which has 600,000 books available for purchase. Sony’s Reader device is less expensive than the Kindle, which librarian Emily Walshe attacks in her opinion’s piece, stating that the Kindle shortchanges readers on ownership rights.

Walshe makes a good point. You can’t really own an electronic book the same way you can own a paperback/hardcover novel. There’s no room for the reader to sell back the book or even give it away. Whenever I finish a book, I give it to a friend or a library to increase readership circulation, and the e-book and Kindle prevent any further exchange of this.

My friend, Daniel Hollister made a strong argument for the Kindle in my fall of journalism blog entry:

The Kindle has sold at least a few hundred thousand units, and its advantage is that it doesn’t look like a “screen” — it looks like a book. The eInk technology works like an Etch-a-Sketch basically. There is no strain on your eyes that would not be present with a book, and the thing requires power only to change pages.

The Kindle was designed to have a more natural feel to it, and this could increase sales, but the Kindle does not provide the full reader experience as real books do.

I philosophize on the difference between suffering and choice and rant about education and childhood ties in my nonfiction blog. Go check them out, but only after you read my posts below.

British actress, Natasha Richardson died before her time this afternoon. The 45-year-old star suffered a traumatic head injury during a skiing lesson yesterday. Hours before Richardson’s death, sources close to Richardson blasted reports that she was brain-dead. These reports may not have been far off because Richardson’s friends told the Internet Movie Database that there was “no hope” for the actress’s survival:

Just before the tragic news was confirmed by Richardson’s publicist Alan Nierob, close pal Ted Casablanca reported the family members spent Wednesday afternoon saying their goodbyes to the actress on his Eonline.com blog.

He wrote, “The two-day vigil is over. Close relations to Natasha Richardson tell me there is no hope for the 45-year-old actress.”

It looks like the media didn’t want to report their doubts about her survival. It’s not necessarily nice to predict someone’s death, but if it’s obviously about to happen, it should be in the news.