Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

no

ok, two gentlemen i trust

chomping at the bit waiting for an affordable bare-bones e-book reader and god knows apple aren't gonna be the ones to produce it. how long was it between the release of the ipod and the glut of £25 (but perfectly usable) mp3 players?

also wonder how the tendency toward having one all-consuming product (phone, mp3 player, camera, video camera, etc) will effect this? i'd say the next gen of products need a bigger screen and more suitable battery life.

there seemed a time when e-book readers seemed real unnecessary and doomed to failure because of this, but i guess this disproves it. (apologies i couldn't find a non-dickish news source).

and im still amazed/frustrated there isn't a homebrew pdf reader for the DS. though i think there are programs for reading doc files, which could be handy for reading website articles and non-picture ebooks

it's apparently hella complicated but there's about a dozen different half-working pdf readers for the ds. Here's one with a ton of tech background.
http://ands-pdf.blogspot.com/

damn i couldn't find any of that when i last looked. that link is just baffling though, i think i'll just convert it all to text and use a simple text reader with my acekard. <a href=http://www.ds-xtra.com/ReadMore>;this</a> sounds good but basic, can you or anyone recommend a more advanced reader?

doh http://www.ds-xtra.com/ReadMore

ok, readmore doesn't work on my DS, the touchscreen doesn't work so i can't load any books. seems it's riddled with bugs and hasn't been tinkered with in years. annoying as it looked like the best text reader out there.

the acekard 2i i use lets me open text files, but it's crap - text has to be black on white (no colour choices) and if a word doesn't fit onto one line it just cuts the last few letters off and puts them on the next line, looks ugly. also tried a program called DS reader but it doesn't separate paragraphs too well so certain text files just look like a huge slab of text. frustrating how something as simple as 'showing text on a screen' can be implemented so very badly.

the best one seems to be DSlibris but for some baffling reason it won't open text files, you have to convert them into xht files, so i'm downloading openoffice for that now. all this waffle probably shouldn't be on this thread but i just wasted a whole evening arsing about with all this so i'll leave it here in the hope it'll help someone else out in the future. </martyr>

I got a Sony Reader for Christmas. Agree with the post above that their software and store are both crap. I bought a couple public domain books for $.99 and they were essentially just unformatted text files in Times New Roman. You get what you pay for, I guess.

I don't know how much reading reading I'll do on this thing, but I've uploaded all of my design book and Adobe help PDFs on it and can see the Reader becoming a big boon as a portable reference library.

also wonder how the tendency toward having one all-consuming product (phone, mp3 player, camera, video camera, etc) will effect this?

I've wondered about this too, and further wondered whether the next trend in a couple of years will be separate gadgets that each do their thing really well, while being perfectly interoperable as need arises?

lol will this be the kindle-killer

http://images.barnesandnoble.com/pimages/bravo/whiteout/nook_tech_crunch_burst.gif
http://images.barnesandnoble.com/pimages/bravo/intro/Nookpanel_1.jpg
http://images.barnesandnoble.com/pimages/bravo/intro/Nookpanel_2.jpg
http://images.barnesandnoble.com/pimages/bravo/intro/Nookpanel_3.jpg
http://images.barnesandnoble.com/pimages/bravo/intro/Nookpanel_6.jpg

http://www.tgdaily.com/images/stories/article_images/apple/mac_tablet/mac_tablet_mockup_001_perspective.jpg

hope the new tablet actually has a click wheel a la http://www.theonion.com/content/video/apple_introduces_revolutionary

http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/how-story-reader-works-2.jpg

next iteration of the Kindle is edible

http://media3.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/photo/2010/01/20/PH2010012001267.jpg

one simple and much-needed thing that magazines/newspapers should provide for these new e-readers: the ability to *easily* download pdf (or text/html whatever) files of specific articles for a small cost, say 50p or £1. as well as making it real easy to download an entire magazine for the same or slightly-less as the print copy price.

some magazines are already doing this - i recently bought a couple of articles from sound on sound for £1 each - but it needs to become commonplace with the nme, q, etc. all the time i see articles mentioned that i'd love to read, such as the casabalanca records article in this month's Q but there's no way i'll trek to the shops and pay 4 or 5 quid for the full thing, whereas i won't mind paying 50p or a quid to download it at home in seconds. happy customers, more £££ going to the publisher/magazine, it's ridiculous that this isn't widespread already.

WTF, Amazon pulls all Macmillan books from the Kindle in a pricing dispute

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/30/technology/30amazon.html

shitty---I have a book under contract with Macmillan; though it is lol academic so it's not like the sales, with or without Amazon, will push me into the upper tax brackets. Anyway it will look great ON IPAD.

$15 for an ebook is insane, especially given the limitations on the form (you can't loan it to people, for example). $9.99 for an ebook is too high, I think, and is the main reason why I haven't gotten a Kindle.

15 bucks may be too high for some people, but amazon is not selling *any* of Macmillans physical books *or* e-books at the moment, which seems like a shitty way to negotiate.

Good post from Cory Doctorow:

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/01/29/amazon-and-macmillan.html

The tactic work well recently for Costco wrt Coke products, it's a very Wal-mart strong arm approach

Macmillian is just losing sales here. People who are looking for a specific book they publish will buy it elsewhere, but other people who find one of their books through a keyword search won't be able to buy it, and will probably buy a book on that topic that's put out by another publisher.

And Doctorow's right, $15 is ridiculous because hardcover books are often discounted to ~$15, especially on Amazon, so it would make little sense for someone to spend that much for a DRM'd digital file when they can get a hard copy--which they can legally resell, share, and put on their bookshelves--for the same price.

One last thing: I really want to buy an e-reader, but I'm going to have trouble justifying the cost to myself until the technology becomes more open. For music, you can already buy non-DRM'd music in FLAC and MP3 from various websites, but right now for the Kindle you can only buy books from the Kindle store for use on your Kindle, and as we saw with that whole 1984 debacle, Amazon can always just take your books back if they decide to. While, as people said at the time, Barnes and Noble can't change their minds and break into your house to steal the copy of 2666 or whatever that you bought a week ago.

other people who find one of their books through a keyword search won't be able to buy it, and will probably buy a book on that topic that's put out by another publisher.

I really don't think so. I've worked in bookstores before, and while some buyers may do this, the majority do not.

15 bucks for an e-book doesn't seem ridiculous to me. not when a kindle costs over 250 bucks.

If someone's looking for an introductory book on, say, gardening, if all of the Macmillian books on gardening are out of stock, but there are plenty of such books there by other publishers, you don't think people will just buy one of the books from other publishers? I don't think someone in this situation would care who's publishing the book, they just want something on their topic.

different situation. in your first example, you stated had a customer who wanted a *specific* gardening book by Macmillian, not someone who's looking for *any* book on gardening

you can only buy books from the Kindle store for use on your Kindle

Not true, and btw 80% of what I have on my Kindle (~100 titles) was free.

other people who find one of their books through a keyword search won't be able to buy it, and will probably buy a book on that topic that's put out by another publisher.

Someone types in "gardening," and it pops up with a bunch of books, the first of which is a Macmillian one. They look at it, as well as the other books in the list. Unless they think the Macmillian book is way better than all of the gardening books, I think this person would just pick up one of the ones from another publisher, because all they want is some book on their topic.

Jaq, where else can you buy books from?

or they buy the book from a third party, which amazon still links to

They could do that too.

http://www.google.com/search?q=free+kindle+books&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

15 bucks for an e-book doesn't seem ridiculous to me. not when a kindle costs over 250 bucks.

I disagree. I can save up $250 for a one-time e-book reader purchase, but then having to justify up to $120/month, assuming I read two books a week (which is on the high side of normal for me) just doesn't make sense. Especially when you look at the $15 compared to the cost of paper books. And especially especially when you consider the reduced costs for the publisher when selling e-books as opposed to paper books (p-books?). The cost of e-books seems like publishers being stodgy in their approach to new media formats.

Though to be fair, tt would be less than $120 a month in reality though, since at least half of what I read is old and prob. public domain.

yeah, i see what you mean. i guess the way i look at it is: am i willing to spend 15 bucks on dinner? i do that all the time, without even thinking about it. (although, to use your example, I don't usually eat dinner out twice a week.) i'm just saying, i get hours and hours or enjoyment from a book, even if i pay 15-30 dollars for it, and the satisfaction i get out of a meal i pay the same amount for is what, 8 hours?

Thanks Que! I knew you could send text files and such to the Kindle, but I forgot you could load non-Kindle books on there too.

Since there's no way I'm going to be buying an iPad for a while, maybe I'll save up for one of these and just deal with DRM. Even if I switched to an iPad later, I could still use the Kindle App to access whatever books I buy from the Kindle store.

Jaq, where else can you buy books from?

I get books from google books, but also anything available in doc, txt, pdf, ePub, mobi, etc can be put on a Kindle.

That's awesome.

If you guys don't already use it, Instapaper works on the Kindle too: http://www.instapaper.com/

I use Instapaper all the time, and can testify to the fact that the iPod Touch/iPhone app is so useful for queing blog posts and articles from the internet to read when you're away from your computer.

Especially useful if you have an iPod Touch and are going somewhere without Wifi. After it syncs with the Instapaper server, all of your articles are downloaded to your device and you can read them without any internet connection.

TechCrunch: "Amazon Caves To Macmillan’s eBook Pricing Demands"

http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/31/amazon-caves-to-macmillans-ebook-pricing-demands/

Nicest interface to well formatted free books for kindle: point your kindle Web browser to www.feedbooks.com, and you'll land on a download page for a kindle guide which, when downloaded, is a convenient directory to the feedbooks catalogue of several thousand public domain titles in kindle friendly .prc form (click a title, and the kindle downloads it over whispernet). It doesn't have all of project gutenberg or google books, but what they do have tends to not have odd formatting issues with carriage returns that you'll find in a lot of those other sites.

“We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books.”

God, what bitches. OH HORRORS, THEY HAVE A MONOPOLY ON PRODUCTS THEY THEMSELVES DEVELOPED AND PRODUCED? QUICK SOMEBODY CALL THE ANTI-TRUST COMMITTEE.

I believe that is what's known as "selling a product". Not "having a monopoly". And amazon.com is known as "a whiny baby".

hahah that is so ridiculous. pot -> kettle

I think part of the rationale for the $15 pricing is to protect the print book sales area, ie making the ebooks closer to them in price and maybe not offering the ebook for sale when an original hardcover first is released.

Also consider that for any smaller or less-known authors, the profit made on an ebook edition could make a giant difference in the P&L, enough to allow the editor to justify acquiring the project in the first place. Yes, CEOs just want to make money, but editors actually want to discover new authors and publish good books, so they have a lot of incentive to find ways to make the $$ work.

I think part of the rationale for the $15 pricing is to protect the print book sales area, ie making the ebooks closer to them in price and maybe not offering the ebook for sale when an original hardcover first is released.

Sorry, that doesn't read right but you can probably extrapolate: pricing ebooks higher protects the print book market, as does delaying ebook releases until the shine is off the hardcover -- probably only by a month or two, though -- not nearly as long as you'd have to wait for a paperback edition of the same title.

Instead of thinking of ebook sales as cream on top of the publisher already making a profit on the print sales of a book, think about the print sales as not making enough to justify bring out a new author.

As pubs are getting more and more consolidated and "big media" and shareholder expectations keep expanding above and beyond what a respectable "literary" house used to be required to do, ebooks might be what keeps young/new authors in print in some fashion...

I'm sure I'm like person number 45,678,934,583 to suggest this.