iRex Iliad review

by Henry Farrell on November 28, 2007

The “howls”:http://www.boingboing.net/2007/11/20/amazon-kindle-the-we.html “of”:http://www.kottke.org/remainder/07/11/14512.html “derision”:http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2007/11/more-kindle-com.html greeting the announcement of the Amazon Kindle last week reminds me that I never got around to reviewing the “iRex Iliad”:http://www.irextechnologies.com/products/iliad that I bought some months ago. I can’t provide a proper comparison of the two; not only do I not own a Kindle, obviously, but I haven’t even used the Iliad to read DRM-protected books (this has only become a possibility in the last few months; before that you were limited to PDFs and the like). But for my particular purposes as an academic, the Iliad works very well. It’s still a first generation technology, and has several kinks that could, and should, be ironed out. Even so, what I’ve seen convinces me that academics are likely to become early adopters of this technology _en masse_ when it comes down in price and becomes a little more user friendly.
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But … but I thought greed was good!

by John Holbo on November 28, 2007

Kevin Drum responds to Matthew Yglesias, who is wondering why it took the social conservatives so long to come around to Huckabee, if this is what they wanted all along. Drum quotes the title of his review of Chait: “Forget neocons and theocons. It’s the money-cons who really run Bush’s Republican Party.” (I’m actually just about to get started reading The Big Con [amazon] myself.) If you want some confirming evidence for that thesis, check out this Robert Novak column, “The False Conservative”:

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