Well, Jobs is somewhat right about Flash (it fucking sucks), and as for Google, I've always thought that moving to a reliance on web-only applications/programs is only partially useful.
Jobs says some incredibly short-sighted (and outright stupid) things sometimes. When asked about ereaders a couple of years ago he responded along the lines of "No one reads anymore." Which is flat-out wrong, and blatantly stupid. Think about how much time the average person spends on the internet every day. And I'm not talking about dicking around on message boards, either. I'm talking about looking up information, online newspapers, reading for entertainment, etc. More people read now than ever simply because of that ease of access - I'm not convinced it's made the world more intelligent as a whole, or that everything being read is beneficial or edifying, but it's a fact. And now he's using that fact as a selling point for his slab.
I think ebooks are one of the best things to come out of the internet. Do they take some getting used to? Sure. However, I've already read books that I never would have had access to (without extensive travel or enormous amounts of money) had ebooks never existed. I do worry a little about the future, and what could potentially be lost forever should books and information make that shift to being solely delivered in a digital format, but while they're around I'm glad I can take advantage of them.
As for pricing, this is just another example of media corporations making the transition to digital by overreacting, and fucking themselves into a rampant piracy situation before they finally wise up and start realising that five dollars is better than no dollars. They better come to that realisation faster than the music and movie businesses did, though. I agree with the thought that this will be worse than music or movies, as far as piracy. There are already scanning groups out there who OCR paper books which aren't available in ebook formats (which is sort of crazy to me, considering the time involved). The average size of an ebook in a pure .txt file format is around 500kb, and as I've said it takes less than a second to download. You don't need torrents or newsgroups to get them. What would be equivalent to a bookshelf full of novels can be sent as an email attachment. This will spin out of corporate control faster than music or movies ever did, because you don't need anything special to pirate it.
