If you wait long enough, they’ll be giving them away in various cross-promotions. That’s the only reason I got my first ipod - it was in the middle of a back-to-school giveaway, where they gave you a free 4GB ipod with the purchase of any Mac computer.
I would prefer to just collect all the books that people start giving away when they get these ken doll things, though. Just as I prefer the sound of my vinyl records (which I’m not giving away, ever!) to CDs or anything I’ve heard through an ipod, I prefer a real book to any of the electronic imitators I’ve seen.
Kindles have 3G capability out of the box. Someone with a Kindle can browse the Amazon website, purchase, and download books direct to the Kindle using any available 3G network around Australia. The end user does not need any contract with anyone, the entirety of the 3G costs are born by Amazon. Amazon has deals like this with service providers around the world. I have no reason to doubt that the cost to Amazon in Australia is more than the cost in the USA. This is the reason why Kindles are not available everywhere, if Amazon has not been able to come to an agreement with the cellphone service providers in a particular country then their “Whispernet” service won’t work and they won’t sell the device.
I’ve been doing some research into this lately (I had someone at work asking me about them a few days ago, interestingly) and this does seem to be the case.
However, from a marketing and PR perspective, Amazon genuinely don’t even seem to be trying to get into the market here. Borders have an E-reader which they’re marketing fairly strongly in-store, most electronic/tech places have got at least one E-reader available, and there’s all those people that brought iPads to use as E-readers (not to mention the various other iDevice apps).
The problem with the E-readers here IMHO is cost and features- the ones that have decent screens either cost a fortune or have zero features besides being an E-book reader (and the Borders E-reader is actually less convenient to carry around that a small paperback, IMHO) and the cheap ones have screens so dark you can’t see anything on them and the screen blacks out temporarily when you turn the page.
It’s a great technology and one I’m really keen to see develop (despite my interest in actual books too!) but they need to get a lot cheaper, a lot better quality, with better features and far cheaper books before I’ll invest in one.
It all depends on what you want of course. I have a Kindle DX and it replaces several manuals I carry for work which allows me to put a bag in the cabin as a passenger and avoid paying excess luggage fees. It is probably less convenient than a single book, but far more convenient than carrying a library around with me. If I was only using it for reading books I would prefer to have the smaller version. Battery life is around 2 weeks with the wireless turned off.
As for the price of books, I’m not really bothered. A number of older books are free and I’ve always felt I’m paying for the experience of reading a book, not for a physical thing. To me a book, once it has been read, is just a waste of space. The exception is high quality reference books. The cost of manufacture and distribution doesn’t come into my thinking when considering what price I’m willing to pay for something. It’s either worth what I use it for or it isn’t.
For people worried about proprietary formats, get Calibre, it is an ebook manager for your PC/Mac that converts book formats among other things.
There’s actually a lot of smoke being blown around about open/proprietary formats. Amazon’s azw format is proprietary, but it’s basically minor tweaks to the open MobiBook standard plus a heavy proprietary “wrapper” for DRM (digital rights management). An unprotected Amazon book is close enough to Mobi that most conversion programs (and I’ll second the recommendation of Calibre, BTW), would have no problem handling it.
Adobe uses the open EPUB format but wraps their proprietary ADEPT DRM system around it.
Barnes & Noble uses the open EPUB format but wraps their own proprietary DRM system around it, or will accept the proprietary ADEPT DRM.
So, when you get down to it, they all pretty much the same in terms of the impact on Joe BookBuyer. You have a well-understood, easily convertible ebook format wrapped in a proprietary DRM encryption package. It’s not the basic ebook format that creates issues about the long-term access to purchased books - it’s the DRM. If the company that sold you the book stops supporting that DRM protocol and can no longer supply you with the necessary decryption keys, it won’t help you the least little bit of the format underneath the DRM encryption is open.
Unfortunately, conversion programs like Calibre can’t help with the DRM issue. I have a certain sympathy, therefore, for the folks who publish cracks of the ebook DRM systems. I’d love to be able to strip the DRM off my purchases for long-term archival purposes. But the cracks I have seen seem to be fairly easy for the publishers to counter as they issue updates to the DRM software.
Thanks for the breakdown on that, ChordedZither. I probably misread something, but I’m not 100% clear of the implications of your post. You seem to be saying that a Kindle-store book could be converted to something more generic like the ePub format, but then later you mention that stripping off the DRM can be problematic.
Say I buy a Kindle book and wish to convert it to ePub for long-term archival purposes.
Is this possible using just Calibre?
Do I have to have an ever-changing piece of software that can strip the DRM first?
Is this legal according to Amazon’s terms? (I’m guessing no).
Is the reverse possible with Calibre?
My last question would be in the case where a book wasn’t available in the Kindle Store but I wanted to read it on the Kindle.
Thanks in advance for any clarifications you can give.
Some Kindle books are not protected with DRM (typically the ones you from Amazon for free, most of which are public-domain books culled from Gutenberg and similar open projects). Those can be converted with just Calibre. If the book is protected with DRM, then Calibre by itself can’t help.
My point however, is that if your question was “Say I buy an Adobe/Barnes & Noble book and want to convert it to unprotected epub for long-term …”, the answer would be the same. If you actually paid $$ for it, it will probably be protected with a proprietary DRM, and Calibre alone will not be able to convert it.
Yes
You’ve guessed right.
Calibre converts among unprotected formats. Once your book has been wrapped inside DRM, Calibre can’t interpret it at all.
If the books available in a non-DRM version, converting it for reading on the Kindle is no problem. For example, at Project Gutenberg you can download books in text, unprotected Mobi (for Kindle), or unprotected epub(for Nook, & Sony). If you run into a site that offers only Mobi and you have a Nook, or if you find a site that has only epub and you have a Kindle, that’s when you use a program like Calibre.
The fact is, the basic ebook formats aren’t all that complicated. As a college prof., I already make my lecture notes available to students online in HTML and PDF formats, and have been looking at the possibility of releasing them in one or more ebook formats. Generating the actual book isn’t all that hard - what’s holding me back is the management problem of keeping them up to date every time I change something.
Just figured I’d mention that, for whatever it’s worth, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Borders aren’t the only places to get eBooks for your reader. There are other stores that may or may not use DRM, and which may very well cost less (A quick look at Baen’s Webscription eBook catalogue seems to list things in the $5 or below range depending on the book).
Also, I gotta pimp out the Baen Free Book Library. They put some of their older books up for free download in a wide variety of DRM-free formats, basically to get people interested in buying some of the NEWER books (or, in many cases, dead-tree editions of the free ones because lots of people like books they can hold).
Right now the current range of eReaders (with Wi-fi built in) are right in my price range, but I already have a Sony Reader (one of the first or second gen ones) which I got as a present. It still works great, and it’s cheaper than buying a new one.
The thing was super handy on the trip over the Pacific, since I didn’t need to plug it in, and it fit easily in my carryon (I still packed two hardbound Honor Harrington books. I’m trying to catch up on the series).
If you’re concerned about your collection becoming inaccessible in the future, just try and make sure to only buy DRM-free formats. I find myself buying a paper book, and then downloading a pirated eBook just so I can put it in the eReader and carry it around with me in my backpack without the extra bulk-weight.
Late to the party, but it would have to be less than $30. I can’t be trusted with something so easily broken or left behind. It would have to be less than the value of one hardcover book to justify the extremely high liklihood that I would lose or break it.
This is a valid point. You have to accept a certain level of risk you don’t with paper books.
In the 2.5 years I’ve had a Kindle I have dropped it from a significant height twice (fortunately it survived some some cosmetic scratches), and lost them three times. Once on a shuttle bus out of De Gaulle airport in Paris, once I somehow left it on a bench in a mall while waiting for my wife to shop, and once on top of a clothes rack in Macy*s after thoughtlessly putting it down to dig through clothes for the right size.
Fortunately I recovered it each time. Though this suggests I shouldn’t be trusted with expensive toys.
Actually, that raises an interesting point. Having lost a couple of ipods, I’ve often thought - why don’t they come with a suicide button, so that if it’s lost or stolen, you click some button on the computer with which it regularly synchronizes that will completely disable it whenever the person who picked it up goes to synchronize it with their computer? Once word got around that they were useless to anyone but the original owner with proof of purchase, it would serve as an anti-theft feature…
This thinking or Tech could just as easily work the other way. After a given number of years a particular contractual period, the DRM/Wrapper could permanantly unlock and give up its text. Much the same as the Millenial Countdown scare/meme but this time bringing works of art and information into the Public Domain. Party, over, OOps, out of time!
I’m researching Mom’s Xmas presesnt (I’m the kid that always gets mom the gadgets, last year it was an iPod Nano), and I’m torn between the Kindle and Nook. The Kindle has the ‘top bananna’ status as the go-to ebook reader, but the Nook supposedly has some agreement to download ebooks at the library…does anyone have any experience with that?
I looked at readers this weekend for myself, and couldn’t quite pull the trigger. The Kindle at $140 is really compelling…but that 3g option is juuuust a little more…but then the 3G nook’s $200, which is just a little more, then Holy Crap I’m dropping $200 for something I don’t really need.
Sure, it’s better than reading books on my iPhone 3GS, but $200 would buy a LOT of books for it.
