I’d love to buy one, but there are a lot of computer materials that i need and they just aren’t there. Every book in the last 30 years must exist in digital form. I would imagine many more would be available on Kindle.
Are you talking about Kindle specifically or electronic books as a whole?
There is/was a lawsuit regarding e-books. Since it’s a new technology, publishers didn’t have the language in their contracts to get revenue from them. As a consequence, Amazon at one time was pocketing all profits from Kindle book sales.
Of course the publishers and authors got mad and filed a lawsuit. Some authors are/were withdrawing their permission for electronic versions of their books, some have decided to let things play out.
Hmm, that’s interesting. I’d also noticed that the selection from some of my favorite scifi/fantasy authors was poor on Kindle.
However, it looks like Amazon is rolling out a new revenue sharing structure (based on the apple app store 
) that would give publishers 70% of the proceeds if they meet certain criteria. Hopefully that’ll get more publishers to jump (back?) on the boat.
Keep in mind, the Kindle will happily read other formats - for example, you can get Baen Free Library stuff in .mobi, which you can transfer to your Kindle as easy as pie. I believe it costs something if you want to do it by Whispernet, but if you download to your computer you can just transfer it with the cord.
Umm… not sure I get this. Amazon can create and sell the etext version of a copy righted literary work and not pay anyone? That sounds impossible.
This is either imagined or misremembered. At no time has Amazon taken all the profits from publishing Kindle book sales, except maybe for books that are in the public domain (which are generally offered for free anyway).
A writers group did sue Amazon over the text-to-speech facility introduced in a newer model of Kindle, and Amazon decided to let publishers choose whether to allow books to be spoken.
I think you misunderstood the recent flap over Amazon moving to an “agency” model for Kindle books for some publishers (if not all).
Until recently, Amazon was purchasing ebooks from the publishers and selling them at their own price, often at a significant loss, because they wanted to make ebooks more popular and didn’t care so much about losing money in the short term. Now, with some publishers, they’ve changed to an “agency” model where they act as an agent for the publisher, and the publisher sets the price. As a result, prices for some books have gone up.
But Amazon was never taking all profits on non-public-domain books…
Remember that there are dozens of e-readers and a whole pile of different ebook formats. Not all publishers will want to go with a proprietary format that locks people into a single vendor. There are a lot more ebooks out there than you’ll see on amazon.com.
[moderating]
Since this is about books, I moved the thread from GQ to Cafe Society.
[/moderating]
It’s just not true that every book of the 30 years exists in digital form. Until very recently most publishers used paper for the majority of the process.
Taking a manuscript to print is long and complicated process. It gets read by the editor and talked over with author. It goes to proofreaders and to copyeditors. The art department has to decide every detail of the text, from font and leading to margins to page numbering to chapter styles. The final product existed in a variety of paper forms, from galleys to advance proofs. It’s easier to do many of these steps on paper, especially for anybody who had been in the industry long enough to get to a position of authority. And getting a final book to an author in electronic form would be difficult because of the variety of proprietary formats used.
Even when a book is done and in electronic form, conversion to the Kindle may be difficult. Straight text is easy to handle. But the Kindle has millions of idiosyncrasies and is another proprietary format. Handling footnotes is a pain. Far worse is that it doesn’t scale jpg’s. If you have pictures, tables, charts, or other things that the text relies on - as I imagine every computer book does - the Kindle renders them almost useless.
All that is in addition to the contract issues that were already mentioned.
Books created in the future will be designed to be adaptable. Older books that are straight text are easily adaptable. The ones in between may not be adapted ever, unless they become somebody’s pet project.
Have you checked out safari books?
They have model somewhat like netflix where you pay a subscription to get access to huge library of technical books from all the main publishers like oreilly and the books are in digital form and can be read on kindle or (in my case) iPad.
Exapno Mapcase it is not true that the Kindle format is proprietary it is plain old mobi format with proprietary encryption around it.
It’s not even a proprietary encryption – it’s straight Mobipocket DRM. Mobipocket, on the other hand, is a custom version of HTML 3.2, which is not great for more complex HTML layouts.
However, the Topaz format, Amazon’s other format, IS a proprietary format that was only recently cracked, and it is more like a PDF-style image-based format with a non-visible OCRed text version mapped to the image for searching. Amazon developed this format because many of the books they were going to put on the Kindle had no electronic version, and the fastest way for them to turn those paper-only books into ebooks was to scan them in and turn them into Topaz files.
Just to be clear, is there anything about listing on amazon.com that truly locks the publisher into amazon being their sole ebooks vendor? Because I’ve seen a lot of the same titles on amazon.com kindle store and sony ebook reader store, for example - at least, I think there were a fair number.
Kindle format is ‘locked into’ a few devices that support it - the kindle, windows machines and iphones AFAIK, but if the publisher wants to publish the title in another ebook format, is there anything stopping it? Does amazon try for an exclusive right on ebook distribution, but perhaps is willing to negotiate on that if they get a concession with other terms?
I’m very interested in learning more about this, as the proud owner of a brand new Kindle 2. 
Check your local library first - they may already subscribe.