Kindle ebooks

[Angel]

I have been thinking about buying a kindle ebook reader as they seem to be quite popular. I looked on Amazon and found you can download the software and read the books as a kind of PDF withought actually buying the kindle. On it they have zombie books/novels for about $2.

I know that some people tend to prefer "dead tree" books but personally I like digital books because they save resources ie "dead trees" and assuming you used green energy would probably save pollution and such.

I think that $3-$6 for a book is incredible value and should allow people to buy books which they normally couldn't afford in the same way that Fords mass production techniques made cars affordable to the .. er masses

[MurderCityDisciple]

I have been thinking about buying a kindle ebook reader as they seem to be quite popular. I looked on Amazon and found you can download the software and read the books as a kind of PDF withought actually buying the kindle. On it they have zombie books/novels for about $2.

I know that some people tend to prefer "dead tree" books but personally I like digital books because they save resources ie "dead trees" and assuming you used green energy would probably save pollution and such.

I think that $3-$6 for a book is incredible value and should allow people to buy books which they normally couldn't afford in the same way that Fords mass production techniques made cars affordable to the .. er masses

I got a kindle for xmas...it's pretty cool...the nice thing really about kindle is you can carry several hundred books with you at a time.

Also Palladium's double column style of typesetting works awesome on the kindle because you have to enlarge the print to read...you can enlarge and read a column at a time instead of having to scroll left to right as you read with regulary formatted books.

Plus...Drive Thru RPG has cheap Rifters PDF's as well.

[azazel1024]

Yeah, pipe dream for now. Most book prices are publisher controlled, which means as high as or higher than paper book prices, which makes little sense other than protectionism for paper publishing as electronic publishing costs tend to be significantly lower for the publishers than ebook sales/publishing. Considering reseller margins on paper sales compared to ebook sales, a price comparable ebook likely makes the publisher from 10-30% more since they don't have a book to print and ship. So the fact that most price controlled publisher prices their ebooks at parity to paper books or even higher pisses me off a hell of a lot.

I don't need my ebooks for free, but I'd like to be buying them with the same margins built in, not EXTRA margins. IE I'd like to be paying say $5 for my ebook when the paper one is $7-8. Not $7-8 or even $10 for the ebook when the paper book is $7-8.

That aside, I have a nook simple touch (Christmas present) that I am loving and I have an iPad 2. iPad 2 is 1,000x better for PDF reading, but for actual ebooks it is a lot better than the iPad 2. I've converted just about my entire library to ebooks and donated the dead trees to my local library (with a few exceptions, like my leather bound lord of the rings trilogy book, my Harry Potter books (1-7 US, 1-7 UK and 1-4 French editions). It freed up a full book case and most of a closet (I donated roughly 300 books between two seperate donations).

I'd be lying if I said I bought every single ebook version of the paper book, but basically every single NEW book I've bought before/since the "great donation" I have paid for. (Note, a lot of the books are from authors like David Drake and David Weber who have released CDs with most of their Baen catalog for free in electronic format with some of their hardback books that I had bought which actually accounts for about 40-50% or so of my printed books that I replaced with ebooks, and I had bought maybe 80-90% of the books they have released in print previously to boot)

Still waiting on PB to go electronic on their newer books so that I can buy PDFs of them to reduce by RPG paper catalog (and frankly I like reading PDFs on my iPad 2).

[Hendrik]

Hi there,

I have a Kindle now, too. Christmas present. Seems this is the prefered way these things change hands

Seriously, love it. Much better reading experience than any pad, let alone phone. Very comfy, too.

I for one will keep my real books but will from now on only buy selected (Pally, special editions for books I really like and know I will read more than once), but will buy all the rest, definitely the one-shot pulp (most SF and fantasy and thriller/crime, to be frank), you know popcorn "literature", for the kindle. Cheaper and less tree waste for books that are quite enjoyable ONCE but only take up shelf space afterwards ... and I never could get myself to throw books away so it is getting kind of crowded. As azazel1024, however, I will now give books to the public library. Makes other people happy and clears my home.

Now I want a kindle Rifter subscription ...

Cheers
Hendrik

[Killer Cyborg]

I have an iPad, and it can work the same way.
Currently, I'm reading the book Deadrise, by Steven Gardner.
It's no Stephen King or anything, but it's worth reading if you're into zombie stories.
A lot of paperbacks are throwaway novels anyway, so I think that ebooks are a nice step that fill a good niche.

[Hendrik]

I have an iPad, and it can work the same way.
Currently, I'm reading the book Deadrise, by Steven Gardner.
It's no Stephen King or anything, but it's worth reading if you're into zombie stories.
A lot of paperbacks are throwaway novels anyway, so I think that ebooks are a nice step that fill a good niche.

Love ebooks now - would really like to see some Pally books buyable as ebooks - but a tablet (I have a HTC Flyer) is much better at many things but for reading I prefer e-ink a lot, so for me reading will be done on a kindle (although I think the Sony PRS would be just as good but Xmas decided that for me ).

[azazel1024]

Yeah I got a nook simple touch for Christmas (requested). Since I got it (and love it) all of my reading has shifted to that from my ipad2. I still do PDFs on my ipad2, but that isn't all that many. Before I used my ipad2 maybe 15-20 hours a week, now I use it about 2-3 hours most weeks since I used it for a lot of reading before (I probably average 2hrs of reading a day, most days my lunch hour, maybe another 20-45 minutes snuck in during the day when not busy at work and 15-60 minutes at night before bed).

IMHO eink is far superior to an LCD for general reading, but color rendering and/or large formats a tablet is vastly better. I wouldn't want an eink ereader bigger than the kindle/nook/sony/kobo 6 inch standard (perfect IMHO). Frankly once you get bigger, sure it can be good for PDFs and large format items, like comics...but a tablet can generally display those just fine (for still better, even if you consider a full color eink display, which aren't common, aren't very high res for their size and are really expensive for the one on the market right now), and can do a lot of other things. I don't want to tote around a 10 inch electronic book. A 10 inch multipurpose tablet, sure when I want it. For general reading, I stinking love my little ereader (with the cover, it just fits inside most of my jackets' pockets).