I like the idea of the Kindle and I’ve read a huge number of positive reviews about them (and had the word of mouth positive stuff from friends as well).
I like the idea of carrying all my books around in one place, so that’s a plus. The two downsides are:
Not all books are available - and by all books I mean extremely big contemporary books you’d expect to be; and
The pricing structure is all over the place.
I’m not stupid enough to think that ebooks should cost a few pennies because they’re digital and therefore “free”, but come the fuck on! When you purchase on a kindle you’re giving something like 90% of the money back to the publisher with next to no manufacturing costs. I fail to understand how a kindle version of a book can be MORE than a new paperback, how can that make any economic sense?
Because I haven’t looked at that many books for purchase on the kindle it may be that I’ve just looked at a very unfortunate sample and actually that’s not representative, if that’s so can people chime in and say? On the whole can people find the books they want? And if so is it at a price that is fair, or at least not much more than a store version?
I have a kindle, but I do 99% of my reading on my smartphone [I have a droid] but the same info applies:
1 - yes it is true that not every book is released as an ebook, and they have not yet caught up on the entire back catalog of every author yet.
2 - yes the pricing is all over the place. However the big dirty secret is that you can make your own ebooks from scanning/OCRing your current library of treebooks, there are a number of different programs that will happily change file formats around to the particular file type you need for your ereader. There are even resources for free ebooks that are legal [project gutenberg is one of them, Baen also has a couple hundred free SF/fantasy at their webscriptions.net free library. Various threads in the dope have other info on free ebook sources]
3 - Ebooks as an industry have been around since the mid 90s [I used to review ebooks way back in the early 2000s] however they did not really kick off until recently, so the industry is still sorting itself out. Baen has about the most sensible working relationship with ebooks …I will caution you NOT to buy any ebook that is DRM locked. You do not have to buy your ebooks from Amazon at all. I have not bought book 1 from them - Fictionwise and Baen are my normal supplier, and feedbook [through adliko on my cell phone]
I have a Kobo, and have been fortunate to pretty much find every book I really wanted to read up until this summer for free on Project Gutenberg. My first attempt to read contemporary fiction since the Hardy Boys started this July when I went on my current “ST: Deep Space Nine” binge. It’s been pretty good thus far. But yeah, the e-books are currently about the same price as paper ones. Maybe a dollar less, maybe even MORE than paper. This article I found on google+ attempts to explain why. (link)
The problem is you’re buying e-books from the same people who also sell bound books. They don’t want to kill off their bound book sales by dropping the price of e-books too far. Especially when higher prices on e-books mean higher profits for them.
Short answer: because the publisher sets the retail price on the e-book (if it’s published under the agency model, as many are), while Amazon (or whomever you’re buying from) decides how much they’ll charge you for the print version.
Bottom line: Kindle book prices are indeed all over the place (including some that get offered free or cheap for a limited time). Things may well change in the future, as far as how e-books are priced or sold. Depending on what books you want to read, you can save a heck of a lot of money buying the Kindle versions instead of the print versions, or you could end up spending more.
The thing that really bugs me about the e-books is the sloppy formatting. I essentially got my Kindle for free. One of my textbooks this semester is $150 for the dead tree version. The Kindle version is $45, and the cheap Kindle is now $114 for the version that bombards your silly ass with ads. (Which surprisingly enough, is not in the least bit offensive.) So since I had to buy the book anyway, I said to myself, “screw it, I’ll bite and get me a Kindle.” At first I thought to myself “oh boy, I’m-a gonna buy all my books this way and save a bajillion dollars every semester and not have to wait in line at the bookstore.” But I soon discovered just what has already been mentioned—the prices are all over the place and the deep discount that I got on my chem text is the exception rather than the rule. But it’s really all the typos and formatting errors that really annoy me. Had I shelled for just the Kindle alone I would have been sorely disappointed. The Kindle version of my book has tons of typos, formatting errors, and missing graphics. It might be fine for reading Harry Potter, but for now I’ll stick to the old school textbooks until they start hiring professional proofreaders at Pearson. Cengage may be better, I don’t know—I haven‘t seen any of their stuff in e-book format yet.
The problem is that the machines they use to scan images of the books and turn them into epub files or whatever the kindle uses are not 100% accurate, depending on the font the publisher uses. Some of my e-books can’t distinguish between an ‘i’ and an ‘l’, for instance. I’ve complained to individual publishers about it, as well as to Kobo, and well, they kind of don’t give a shit.
I assume if you read the mega bazillionaire Stephen King/John Grisham/Tom Clancy/J.K. Rowling books, then yeah, they possibly have a proofreader checking for machine errors!
Nope; I read Stephen King’s It on the Kindle, and It had Its share of scanning errors.
I was a little surprised that the publishers didn’t already have the text in an electronic form, which they used to produce the printed book, and which they could have used to generate the e-book as well. Maybe with more recent books they do; surely typesetting by hand is a thing of the past?
This is what I thought! Especially for books I’ve bought written in the past 5-10 years. The only explanation I can think of is that the soft copies are guarded more tightly than a mafia don’s virgin daughter, if they even exist at all. One 1MB .doc file slipped onto a jump drive could single-handedly undercut EVERY sale of an e-book. It would be easier to proliferate than any Mp3 or bootleg movie!
I have a nook, and I have also experienced a lot of scanning errors and missing images, so it’s not just the Kindle. I find it quite aggravating to be reading along, and come across a reference to a picture or some other sort of graphic, and then there’s no image. I’ve always found typos annoying, but the scanning software seems to not be able to recognize when it’s “th” and when it’s “m”. So, I’ll see “the” used for “me”, and the other way round.