ebooks and such.

[Grieve]

And so they fall, one by one...

Today Dustie, tomorrow Slamz, and Friday THE WORLD!!!! (cue evil manical laugh)

[Vllad]

And so they fall, one by one...

Today Dustie, tomorrow Slamz, and Friday THE WORLD!!!! (cue evil manical laugh)

Only those that know nothing about Apples true sense will fall.

For those of us Apple vendors who deal with them on a weekly/daily basis will not be buying any Apple products anytime soon.


Vllad

[Slamz]

Yeah, we all know which device I favor, so I'll spare you the argument. All I know is that it's time to bring out the tried and true favorite end to the argument....

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/3/9/

Bless them...

When I go to lunch, I always bring my Kindle with me. There's an old lady who goes there frequently and she wasn't afraid to tell me that she didn't understand why people were doing these ebooks and she'd never get one herself.

Flash forward to today and she has a Kindle. She decided the problem was she is literally out of places to put books. Apparently she has shelves and shelves full of them and there's just no more room.

So she buys ebooks now because you don't have to worry about where to put them.


Incidentally, ebooks in general are great to read at lunch because you can turn pages with a knuckle.

[Riz]

I actually read books on my phone at lunch. The crispness of the text on the iphone 4 makes it very easy. I prefer to read on the iPad, but I leave that at home most days for my wife (who's using it to read and watch movies if she gets 5 minutes to herself).

I like all the major e-readers in general at the moment. They all do their job quite well. For just text, I do believe the kindle has the edge (except reading in bed with the lights off to let my wife sleep, though the ipad in direct sunlight sucks monkey-nuts).

I like the iPad because it does more than just function as an e-reader. I wanted a convergence of devices. There is something to be said for a device that does one thing and does it well though.

Speaking of which, I'm looking for suggestions to my next foray of reading. My tastes are pretty damn varied, so anything is to be considered.

[Slamz]

Incidentally, have you noticed eBook prices really skyrocketing lately? It's starting to piss me off.

I have yet to read the latest Dresden Files book because the ebook is $12.99. The fucking paperback is $9.99! I refuse to pay more for an ebook than I could pay for the paperback. Apparently Amazon refused to offer the book for some time, and even canceled their pre-orders, trying to get the publisher to lower the price but with other sellers accepting it, they eventually caved in and offered it for sale at the publisher's desired price, and just put up a blurb that says "This price was set by the publisher".

Meanwhile, I bought the Reluctant Swordsman series for something like $3.21 per book. When I look now, though, those same books are $7.19 each. For $3.21 I could recommend the series to you. For $7.19 each, I feel the series should be top notch, and it's really not. It's a good series to read if you find the books for cheap in a bin somewhere. It's not a first rate series that you should be paying first rate prices for.

In fact, reviewing my past orders, it seems like all the ebooks cost more now than they did when I first bought them. Maybe publishers are still feeling out the proper price point, but I can't help but feel that publishers are simply uninterested in the success of ebooks and would really prefer it if the format just plain died.

[Riz]

I'm fully in agreement with your outrage Slamz, but I have to say, it's a fucking excellent book. Buy the paperback if you have to.

[Vanraw]

Wow slamz, this really sucks. I wonder how much publishing cost goes into physical paper back? Paper, printing ans shipping. We might see a trend where ebooks rise to the current hardcover cost, and the hardcovers double.....

This would be standard for the greedy bastards. Like when the Banks introduced ATM's. It saved them Millions in staffing dollars for tellers and such, the cost of errors. It was a benefit to the bank, but now they charge for the right to save them money.

[Slamz]

I think it might just end up being a boon for self-publishers and a detriment to the publishing industry. Shooting themselves in the foot, as it were.

I don't really know "big names" from small names. You can still find plenty of books that are from $1 - $4, which are probably either small publishing houses or self-publishers. Since you can generally get a free sample that includes the first dozen pages or so, there no risk other than a little lost time to try something out.


But it does annoy me to have a book I want to read and feel I'm being fleeced, apparently as part of some general war of big publishers vs the concept of ebooks.

[Jakensama]

I'm getting my dad's book that he published in paperback onto a kindle format for him, and I know recently to compete with apples store Amazon greatly increased the percentage of the sale price the author gets (like doubled it almost), so I wouldn't be slow to chock the increase up to good old fashioned greed.

[Slamz]

Now here's a great trick for buying Kindle books on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?node=154...36=000-500

This will do a Kindle search for books by price. Change the "000-500" to be the price range you want to look in. 000 = free, 500 = $5.

Then you can click into subcategories and it will keep your price range and you can still sort by "bestselling" and so forth.


Hopefully they'll just add buttons for this but in the meantime you can favorite that link. Found out the sequel to the book I'm reading is $7 paperback or $14 eBook. :evil:

[Zirak]

I got a Nook just before my vacation out to California along with a 16 gig microSD card. I picked up a collection of the first three Edgar Rice Burroughs "Martian Chronicles" books for free along with a lot of other classic fantasy/sci-fi also for free, loaded the thing down with about 4 gigs of music and headed off on vacation. I used it for reading and music for the plane trip from Arkansas to California and back again as well as reading during the trip. It worked like a champ.

[Grieve]

Interesting article about the costs and profits (or lack thereof) from regular books vs e-books.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424...EFTTopNews

The new economics of the e-book make the author's quandary painfully clear: A new $28 hardcover book returns half, or $14, to the publisher, and 15%, or $4.20, to the author. Under many e-book deals currently, a digital book sells for $12.99, returning 70%, or $9.09, to the publisher and typically 25% of that, or $2.27, to the author.

The upshot: From an e-book sale, an author makes a little more than half what he or she makes from a hardcover sale.

[Grunldesnapp]

ZIRAK! I love those ERB books. Those were some of the first fantasy/sci fi i ever read. They were supposed to be doing a move either named John Carter of Mars or Princess of Mars, latest rumor is Disney has it for action....WOOT.

On subject i love the Apple books too, got a ton of them for my Itouch and now im reading on my old Palm and Itouch. 10G of books woot woot.

[Kakarat]

I recently bought my mom a Sony E-reader. She gets it on her birthday (oct 10th).
You guys know I am Canadian so I couldn't get a Kindle. Anyways, I will let you know how it is for downloads after she gets it.

I played around with it in the store and found that it worked great.The only issue I had with it was that the pages flipped slowly, that is because it doesn't have a LCD screen. I think its called black ink or something. I bought it mainly because they go on holidays to Mexico every year and instead of hauling books down she could simply take this. Reviews and people in the store told me its great for reading outside (the beach)!
Memory has a choice two types of cards. But mainly an SD card which mom has tonnes of because of cameras.
I don't remember the other off hand.
Its not bluetooth for transferring books but a wire. Which is perfectly fine because my parents don't know much about technology and a wire is what they are comfortable with.
Its a touchscreen and easy to use menus. It comes with a stylus and a function for notes.
There are a few other function on it, but my main concern was the books because that is the purpose of why I was getting it.
It comes with a cloth bag like most expensive sunglasses, where you can wipe the screen off with. I bought one accessory with it;A cover with a light. Its great for nighttime reading.

[Vanraw]

Interesting article about the costs and profits (or lack thereof) from regular books vs e-books.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424...EFTTopNews

The new economics of the e-book make the author's quandary painfully clear: A new $28 hardcover book returns half, or $14, to the publisher, and 15%, or $4.20, to the author. Under many e-book deals currently, a digital book sells for $12.99, returning 70%, or $9.09, to the publisher and typically 25% of that, or $2.27, to the author.

The upshot: From an e-book sale, an author makes a little more than half what he or she makes from a hardcover sale.

That is interesting. One would ask exactly what the "Publisher" does for their 70% in a ebook publishing. Hire lawyers to protect their revenue is my guess.

At some point and time, you would hope that the ebook / emusic business would remove the non value added middle man. I can see the need for a publisher to print and ship product when they are physical. But once you remove that, then all you have is DRM and profit leaching.



Brett

[Zouji]

If the prices of ebooks have drastically increased, then I have pretty much no reason to buy a kindle.

[Vanraw]

So I'm going to be pulling trigger on a gift for my son's birthday. After much analsys, its going to be the new Sony

http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stor...comparison

They new touch screen model comes with the Perl e-ink and brighter screen. (one of the things that was pushing me to a kindle.

The thing it lacks is a wireless connection. But I dont really think this is that big of a deal.

The main reason for going with the Sony beyond the screen improvements is the direct epub and library DRM support. And the fact that you can share purchased books with others. Frankly I can see me buying 3 more of these.

Kindles lack of DRM support is a real ball buster. I understand the business model for doing so, but they are going to lose if their entire goal is to sell books. If Kindle had any sort of rumor or indication that they would ever support Library DRM and the ability to share books, it would be a no brainer.

[Slamz]

I'm curious about the "brighter screen", unless they just mean that the background is whiter/adjustable. The kindle background is sort of a gray. But since these screens aren't lit in any way, and the text is flat black, I'm not sure what "brighter" means.

The touch screen is nice, though I hope they leave a "next page" button in place rather than the "finger smear" technique. Touch screens would be nice for shopping for books and highlighting text but I'd like to keep "next/prev page" as buttons.


It will be interesting to see if Amazon does something for library support. I suppose from their perspective, the success or failure of the Kindle itself may be immaterial, provided eBooks themselves catch on. As far as I know, the Kindle is the only actual Amazon product made by Amazon. Presumably they did it to kickstart the eBook business. If the Sony reader caught on, I could see Amazon simply switching to it. Amazon has some interesting support for the Kindle (you can go to the Amazon website to read/copy your highlighted text, and "ship" books directly to your Kindle) so maybe the future will actually be Some Other Reader that Amazon adopts in place of the Kindle. I have a suspicion that this may have been what they wanted to begin with, but they couldn't get anyone else to develop the reader they wanted.

[Vanraw]

From Sony reader perspective the "Brighter comment" really just means they are now at the level as the Kindle 3. Better phrase is "better readability in full sun light". The previous Sony had a glossy screen which was near impossible to read in sun light (sorta like the iPad....ZING)..

Im really surprised Amazon hasn't chimed in on the Library DRM or book share concept. I cant believe this would be hard to do from a technical perspective, and cant beleive that Amazon hasnt heard the message..... So it must be an active decision to NOT support it. Im thinking because they want to be in the business of selling ebooks not e-readers and a library is sort of counter to a e-book sales revenue stream.