I’m all about convergence and the last thing I want is another device. So, whenever reading a book is a good experience on a smart phone, then I’ll start with that. I also second that ebooks are stupidly priced.
I’ve got tons of specialty books on China/Asia that are free ebooks.
If you offered me one for free, I would decline. I like books. I check 'em out for free at the library. It doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that.
I thought Kindle downloaded from a wireless network.
The price of these things isn’t what holds me back.
The issue for me is longevity. I’ve got books on my shelf I bought decades ago. I do still get them down and read them from time to time. Will a Kindle still work twenty years from now? Will the current file formats still be readable? Somehow, I doubt it.
Oh, the file and format will not be a problem. Those are standardized and all formats that matter are simply added on and concurrent. We have an Encyclopedic Reader.
I like books and check them out of the library all the time too. However, libraries seem to be one of the first items to get cut when the city budget falls short, and the hours and locations aren’t the greatest. Plus, while I’ll read some of what the general public will want to read, I also want to read some things that a library probably won’t have in its general collection. Plus, I want to support my favorite authors, and the very best way I can do that is to buy their books so they can get the sales numbers and maybe royalties.
On my last visit, I picked up half a dozen books, and all but one of them were what I’d consider to be just average. The exception was quite good. Now, I did enjoy reading all of them, but five of them would not find a place in my permanent library, and the exception…well, it was good, but I’m not sure that I’d buy it and keep it.
I wish that I could believe that. However, right now I’m hanging on to my old VCR because I don’t want to buy more copies of various movies that I own, if they’re even available in modern formats. And I have a number of old 5.25" floppies which were supposed to be readable practically forever. I don’t know if I even have a 5.25" drive any longer.
Apparently you can sync your Kindle with a PC (in much the same way you sync an iPod with a computer) to get your books that way. Or so I’ve read, anyway- I don’t know anyone here with a Kindle; the difficulty and cost of getting books for them being the main reason I’ve heard when asking people about it.
The iBook reader for the iPad has similar problems, apparently- there’s not much “New” content on it for Australian readers. So most of the people I know with E-book readers (or apps that do the same thing) are contenting themselves with free E-books of (long out of copyright) “Classics”.
The entire publishing and book price situation in Australia is almost worthy of its own ranty Pit thread, actually…
[quote=“Lynn_Bodoni, post:46, topic:552691”]
Well, it’s more complicated than that, the root file, should be transferable no matter the “marketing or deciphering lock” that’s as ximple as a text file for quite some many years. We will evolve and already have evolved beyond the marketing selection and monied choice.
Same here. I have no problem paying current prices for a Kindle or something. But they get to skip having to physically create, ship, and sell the ENTIRE BOOK, and I save, what? A buck?
Ummmm…no. Actually, for a buck I think I WILL take a physical copy of the book that I am then free to keep outside if your proprietary device’s control and retain rights including, but not limited to, loaning or reselling the book at a later date.
And I’ve got a seriously awful habit of buying books and not reading them. Price those things $4.99 for New Releases, $1-$3 for older books, I’d be in AT LEAST $100 already.
I would only take one if it was free, and then only to smash it. I love paper books and can find good deals on used ones. Electronic readers are only going to drive up prices and hurt me.
I’ll get one when they’re free. I’m spoiled by the satellite TV model. Sign up for our service, get free equipement! That’s how I want ebooks to work.
I also agree about the ebook prices. I don’t care about the physical object, I only care about the story. If the paperback is cheapest, that’s what I’ll buy. If I can get it cheaper used, I will. Since Amazon marketplace sells used books, their ebooks have to compete against that market. Right now, they’re not even trying.
$249, apparently. I love my Kindle 2!
The Kindle itself has already hit the “I’d buy it threshold”: the price drop, the new version, threads here, and browsing all the free content available overcame my resistance, and I recently bought one. I consider it a supplement, not a replacement, for printed books.
I have yet to spend any money on content for it, though I have been acquiring lots of free books. The threshold on how little a book would have to cost before I’d buy it varies from book to book, depending on how much I want to read it, how cheaply I can get a printed version, and how much content there is (e.g. I’d pay more for an omnibus several-books-in-one edition), but in any case would have to be less than $9.99.
I do think e-book prices will evolve. Current bestsellers may always be relatively expensive because they’ll be priced at what the market can bear, but I can imagine publishers trying to entice readers to try new or obscure authors or investigate their back catalog by pricing them very low. I think e-readers will make self-publishing more practicable and common (for both good and ill). I also think periodicals (at least the ones that aren’t very pictorial) would work well on something like a Kindle, and I expect to see that become increasingly popular—and maybe even a resurgence of the “pulp”-type fiction magazines. I, for one, welcome our new e-overlords.
I have ordered, but not yet received, a Kindle 3, but I have already bought and downloaded books to my PC and smartphone. I’m surprised at how readable they are on a 3.7" screen, but I’m guessing they’ll be even more readable on a 6". Plus a non-reflective screen and seriously long battery are pretty essential.
I may be almost alone in this, but I’m not particularly enamoured with, or feel tied to, the paper book format. It’s OK, but it’s very bulky. I have run out of space in my house; there are books everywhere. I love the thought of being able to have up to 3,500 books on a tiny device - which I can take anywhere.
I wasn’t prepared to pay over £200, but £149 (for 3G and wifi) seems reasonable to me. Most of the books I’ve downloaded have either been free, or just pence. The one current bestseller I’ve downloaded was about 50% of the paper book price, which I’m happy with.
The biggest problem, for now anyway, is that I won’t be able to stop buying paper books yet: while there are many ebooks available, there are far too many that aren’t.
I think that’s a crucial point.
I have a Kindle. Most of what I have read on it are free books. I do buy an occasional book that my public library does not have. Once a book is old enough to be in paperback, I find I can usually get it from Amazon for less than the usual $9.99. Given that paperbacks are now running $7-8, I probably average no worse off than if I had bought paper.
But I’m a college professor, and I’m also finding it very useful to buy reference books for my advanced classes and for my research as e-books, whenever possible. My work tends to be split between office and home. I’m tired of lugging heavy books back and forth. I’m even more tired of finding that I *forgot *to lug that heavy book back with me. So at home I read it on my Kindle. At work I fire up “Kindle for PC” and call up the same book there. For that, I’ll pay a lot more than the $9.99 price that many people have been complaining about. My last book purchased was about $45 in the Kindle edition, which was about $8 less than the physical edition. But even if it had been $8 more, I’d have paid it happily.
I’ve been thinking about getting a Kindle, but I don’t really want to spend money on e-copies of the hundreds of books I already own. And a lot of them aren’t available in Kindle’s format, anyway. It seems that they are, however, rather easy to find in PDF format, or something that is easily converted to PDF.
So, are there any disadvantages to reading a book in PDF format on the Kindle rather than its own format?
$200 with free internet or $100 without, with ebooks being $5 or less.
…Aaaaand I realized a couple of weeks ago that I could put a kindle on my sister’s account and have access to all her books (and she buys a ton; amazon is making loads of money off of her). And the day after that I arranged to have her order a kindle for me and to pay her back.
Sure there is. The wireless access costs are higher in Europe and Australia than in the United States. I suppose they could offer different pricing if you are downloading by PC versus wirelessly rather than just averaging it out over all purchases.
Whereas I look at it this way. I’m willing to pay $15-$25 for a new book. I know this because for the last 20 years that’s what I’ve been doing. It matters to me not at a whit what it cost them to produce, ship, and sell me that book. I could learn that Borders had on staff a leprechaun that magically created the physical books and then teleported them into my hands at the cash register and I’d still be willing to pay $15-$25 for the book.
Add full text search, the ability to carry hundreds of books with me at all times without any additional burden, the ability to buy my books without going to a store and yet still have them in hand immediately after making my purchase, the bility to not only annotate my reading but also search those annotations, and finally not needing to either store it with my hundreds or thousands of other books, only a tiny fraction of which are even touched in any given five-year period or deal with disposing of them and I think I’d be willing to pay more for my Kindle versions than I did in all my trips to B&N, Powells, Borders, various independent booksellers.
The big surprise to me is that I don’t miss at all the countless hours spent in bookstores or the countless books I bought and never actually read just because the screwed up incentives of paper publishing and human nature require buying any book when you think you’re interested in reading it at some point rather than buying it when you’re actually going to read it.
So, for all of that I’m quite happy with paying $5.99-$9.99 for most of my Kindle books and I don’t really care if at some unknown point in the future the onward rush of technology means I lose all of the books I’ve bought.
Yes, if I’d been living my life reading on the cheap through public libraries and scouring used bookstores for $1 back list titles from the '60s and I cherished each book as a precious artifact through which I found self-fulfillment and my life knew no greater purpose than to loan a book to someone else so that we’d be able to bond over that exchange of precious materials then a Kindle wouldn’t make sense. Since I don’t do any of those things the only question was whether I’d find reading on a Kindle physically acceptable where all previous eReaders had failed.
So for me, the breaking point is around $300. And less than $15-$20 for books.
Also, on the international costs, is Amazon allowed to sell the U.S. version of eBooks directly to Australian (or other country) customers? Or do they have to sell the Australian edition (which may be essentially identical or not but could have different finances involved)?
Like most everyone else here, I’d be happy to buy a Kindle at current prices if I could just buy the ebooks cheaper. I used my father’s Kindle to read a book recently and the only thing that I found obnoxious was not being able to quickly flip back to a previous page to check what a character had said. The interface was fine, the e-ink didn’t strain my eyes, and with the amount of traveling I do for my job, not having to search out a bookstore would be plenty handy. But I’m just not willing to pay that much extra for old books that I can get used.