141–150 of 189 posts
It will be interesting to see if they also offer bundles at purchase time. "Buy the book for $12, or the book + ebook for $14."
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One of the things I hate the most about reading books is holding them up while reading. eReaders have solved this problem for me, and now I am a happy camper!
You... don't have to hold an eReader up? One of the worst things about reading ebooks on my iPad 2 is the weight.
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In general, I don't buy DRMed books that I want to keep long term for just that reason. I buy the physical book, cut the back off, scan it to a pdf and throw the book into the recycling bin.
Are you opposed to the DRM-stripping tools available? Buying a Kindle book and running it through Calibre seems like an easier route to take than scanning the physical book. On the book scanning note though, do you have a special book scanner? I've never seen one outside of professional shops and turning the pages seems like a ginormous hassle.
I use a Fujitsu fi-5120C hopper-fed scanner (does both sides at once) and a QCM-8200M stack slicer. Those make short work of most books. The Fujitsu scanner software includes an OCR. I scan at 400dpi. If a page gets messed up, I use pdftk to merge in corrected scans.
I also use it to scan in small mountains of old tax records and documents I had stuffed everywhere.
The odd thing is I've come to prefer the pdf images, as they look like a book page (!). This works out great on ereaders with larger screens like the Kindle DX, or the Kobo Aura which has an HD eink display.
The regular Kindle is a bit squinty with a paperback sized PDF, but I bought some dimestore reading glasses which helps wit dat.
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I'm a little surprised anybody could prefer paper books for reference... For me, full-text search, bookmarks, and copy/paste make ebooks far superior for referencing. Not to mention I don't have a bunch of books cluttering my desk. In any case, I completely agree this is awesome. I've been considering selling most of my old physical books and buying the ebook versions, and this will save me a bunch of money.
The almost stereotypical star trek DS9 scene where (anyone) is working on something complicated and has five PADDS on the desk all shuffling around. Relatively few people own and simultaneously use multiple ereaders. Probably much more common in the future.
For me, using a book for reference almost always means I'm writing code and have the online Kindle app open in one or more browser tabs. I didn't even consider the use case where somebody would be referencing books away from the computer.
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Amazon is a wasting disease. It is shuttering small businesses, putting thousands out of work, and filling a fraction of those jobs it destroys with sweatshop warehouse jobs. And in return, the president of the United States praises them for creating those jobs. To say nothing of the negative impact they are having on authors. As with the music industry, it is becoming a superstar machine: either you quickly become a…
What is the negative affect they are having on authors? Isn't Amazon the reason we have access to such amazing new talents as Hugh Howey (Wool series)? The ability to independently publish into an established marketplace is a pretty great boon for aspiring authors.
It has. A handful of creators can make a living from that model, but most can't, because the glut of games drives down the prices substantially. It's a race to the bottom. And the App Store pays out 70% of the proceeds to creators. Amazon's Kindle publishing pays just 35% unless you agree to various conditions.
Aspiring authors aren't really the ones who are experiencing problems. If success is a bell curve, either end of the curve is fine, but the middle of the curve--those authors who are published but who have seen only moderate success--are getting cut by publishers in favor of a kind of VC model. Publishers bet on new talent, but only continue to invest in authors that achieve wide appeal.
This may seem fine, even optimal, to you, but there are lots of authors historically who did not achieve popularity until several books in, and many authors who were not successes in their own time but became successful after their deaths.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example, would not have made it today. He was an author whose first novel sold well but every novel thereafter sold poorly (including The Great Gatsby). Today, he would have been dropped long before he wrote Gatsby.
The publishing industry now is experiencing the same transformation that movies and games have already gone through. Sequels, for example, are favored over original stories. Heck, look at the author you cited. Sequel after sequel.
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I buy my books hardcover now: more cash for the author. Or you could buy what's cheapest and send the difference directly to the author. (This doesn't make sense to do because there's too much friction. One way to deal with that would be to pick a random number between 0 and N and if you get 0 then send them N times that much money otherwise nothing.)
Would it make sense to have the normal Amazon price for Kindles books as they are now but then have an optional button to donate more that goes directly into the author's pocket and nobody else's? Of course only a small percentage would donate anything extra, but it's better than not having the option, and this can reduce a bit of the friction because it's two extra clicks at checkout. I know this has worked in some…
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I think Charles Stross writings on ebooks is interesting and insightful. He should know: he's a tech-savvy best-selling author. (He hangs around here too: [1]) He wrote a couple of posts a year and a half ago, they still apply. In them, he explains how Amazon is making itself a monopoly, and that isn't good for anyone but them. What's been most informative to me is how tiny publishers actually are, and how little mon…
> It's also why I buy my books hardcover now: more cash for the author. Isn't this true, Amazon or not? Hardcovers cost the customer more than paperbacks or ebooks, so the author should be getting hopefully a larger cut of the sale. I think this program (if it has enough titles that I've bought in the past) is going to be awesome. I've never bought a Kindle because paying almost the same price for the Kindle version…
You don't understand the economics of publishing. The paperback, and the hardcover for that matter cost almost nothing to produce. You are paying for the information. Perhaps the ebook should be a dollar cheaper.
This is awesome for the consumer, absolutely. And it's only made possible by the recent DOJ trial that effectively allowed Amazon to set prices of ebooks (wholesale vs agency model). Recall that agency model, the publisher sets the price (the same as apps on the app store). But now that Amazon can set any price they want for ebooks (and take a loss on them if they want to, which they have done before), Amazon can do…
I think Charles Stross writings on ebooks is interesting and insightful. He should know: he's a tech-savvy best-selling author. (He hangs around here too: [1]) He wrote a couple of posts a year and a half ago, they still apply. In them, he explains how Amazon is making itself a monopoly, and that isn't good for anyone but them. What's been most informative to me is how tiny publishers actually are, and how little mon…
Disappointed after reading the thread here. At first look, I thought it would be more along the lines of, "snapshot a few randomly chosen pages from the book with your mobile camera, to prove that you've bought the book in the past and still own/have it now, and then you automaticaly get the ebook version really cheap as a result."