Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

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.

Anyway, we distro our ebooks through the Sony Reader.

I don't plan on getting an e-reader any time soon (I'm too cheap and the technology doesn't seem great yet) but something I wonder about is: you know all those stories about how easy access to mp3s of music have reduced the listener's attention span and they don't give new music as much of a chance to sink in before moving on to the next thing? I don't know if that's a b.s. trend or what but if I had an e-reader and e-books were cheap or easy to illegally download, I wonder if I would read much more superficially? I already get most of my books for free from the library and I think I already tend to give up on books that don't hold my interest because I didn't pay for them, but just the fact that I have to travel to the library and return them and find something else to read maybe keeps me reading longer than I would if all I had to do was download something new.

that is a great point

Well, if the bar to getting a book produced & distributed becomes lower and there's an extremely broad range of stuff avail for no or little cost...you could say that ditching out early on a book that doesn't suit you is a valid approach to a greater variety...? At least you gave something different a try.

Dependent on the reader's individual selectivity of course.

Yeah, I don't think ditching out early is necessarily a bad thing but also some books just require a little more work and concentration.

how long b4 people are uploading kindle books to ysi

I mean you probably could scan over Elementary Aeronautics for 10 minutes and learn something you didn't know, even if you immediately forgot the other 94% of the material. If it didn't cost you anything, so what if you ditched out? xp to self

xp to Nick: Yeah, I dunno? I still am not reading the Gormenghast Trilogy whether it sits on my shelf being overdue or not.

i feel like i go through phases in my reading. sometimes i finish everything i start, not because i feel like it, but because i feel genuinely engaged with the material. sometimes i can't stick with anything beyond a few pages. and it's all basically the same stuff. i don't know if i'll ever get an e-reader until the technology itself (not the e-books) goes down in price. if i had one, who knows, i'd probably go crazy downloading stuff

Yeah I just find myself on some conceptual level being really annoyed by the price of the devices themselves more than the books. The great thing about books has always been (to me) the universal availability of other worlds to live in/experience, assuming basic literacy. Anyone who can read can partake.

The basic set-up that goes "anyone who has $300-400 for some fancy electronics and doesn't mind replacing it after a trip to the beach/bath tub/public transit can enjoy these unique ideas...isn't it great that knowledge is free & shared?!" just rubs me the wrong way. Creating a higher-tier class of readers, maybe? And that doesn't have anything to do with content or literary value or difficulty of the ideas, simply expendable income, which feels like an even more fake distinction.

Yeah, I don't think ditching out early is necessarily a bad thing but also some books just require a little more work and concentration.

― congratulations (n/a), Monday, February 1, 2010 11:25 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ya but do u find (as i do) that mp3ing has given u access to all sorts of weird music u would have never heard, some of which u now love?

yes

QED imo

Kindle app for Mac is here

http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2010/03/hands-on-with-kindle-for-mac.ars

time for me to go try it out

Interface blows, Amazon can't design a desktop app worth anything. The iPhone one is marginally better.

man, i am with you on the interface O_O

at this point, i'm just glad that the thing exists, but i definitely won't be buying too much from the Kindle store as things are

nice to see the whole internet thinks this kindle thing sucks :D

― DG, Tuesday, November 20, 2007 3:02 PM

My parents just bought me a kindle and I have no idea what to do with it.

read things!

can't u get magazines on it or something?

I just got a Kindle. Got a subscription to the Atlantic. $1.25 a month. Lots of free classics too.

Thinking about getting one of these (just released in UK for £110) but I haven't played around with one yet, so I was wondering:
do anyone use one for reading a lot of journal article pdfs? It seems like with a 6" screen, even in landscape mode you would have to zoom and scroll a lot considering the usual format of said pdfs.

I've got a bunch of work pdfs on mine, mostly text stuff. It's okay for reading them with just paginating.

anyone here have both a kindle AND an ipad and wish to comment on what is better for reading? i think i want an e-reader.

am i wrong to suspect these will be at pocket calculator prices in a few years?

If the retail big box I work at is any indication, you are VERY wrong. These things fly off the shelves still, we can barely keep them in stock.

cutty, I know two people with both - they both prefer reading on the iPad, but use the Kindle app on it.