Kevin's Watch

I'm a big fan of reading on our iPad at home. I love it for several reasons. Firstly, I can get english language books more easily than if I popped down to the shop (the most convenient shop's selection runs from top 5 best selling fiction to top 5 best selling non-fiction- so, not much to choose from). Secondly, I mostly read at night, and the husband complains when I leave the lamp on to read, so the iPad is ideal for that since it is self-illuminated and I can turn the light level way down to minimal. Lastly, I love the built-in dictionary, though it is not a very extensive one and I do have to use a more robust dictionary app often.

The real downsides to me are the price of ebooks. They cost as much as a hardcover in many cases and you have nothing to show for it but a file. Not something you will keep on a shelf for 30 years. Also the terms of DRMs are not very nice. I wish they'd offer ebooks are a rate equal or less than the paperbacks. It would be a much nicer model and I'd buy many more.

I'm curious about how many other people read with one of these or those electronic ink devices on a regular basis?

I was gifted with a Kindle for Christmas. Now I do 95% of my reading on it.

It's an "e-ink" device. Personally, I like that choice, as I find myself outdoors frequently, and reading in the dark in bed just about never. Also I enjoy that I need to charge my Kindle once every couple months, not once every couple days. (If only my phone worked that way.)

Would I love a tablet? Sure. But I don't need it as much as I need an e-reader. And I can afford it even less.

My big disappointment is those e-book prices! Ow ow ow. It seems like, when I wanted a kindle, it seemed like a way to get cheaper books. Then when I got a kindle, the industry shifted underneath me.

Not that all books are expensive. Just the ones you want, of course. And the stupidity of driving folks into e-book piracy is just mind-boggling.

Lastly, can't have an e-reader without Calibre. I highly recommend. Converts any book in any form to a .MOBI file. Which if you want a free book from Google and read it on a kindle, this is necessary. But it has a myriad other useful uses.

Yeah, the prices are just silly on many books. I don't really understand the model or the justification. I read an article once, and they tried this approach about how much the server hosting costs and so on. Their argument only made sense to me if they only sold one book and setup a complete service for just that one book. Even then, it wasn't really believable or sustainable as a justification. I guess it's just gouging.

The media companies really do seem to hate the net as a distribution point as they do nothing but fight it instead of working with it.

And, Calibre is awesome. I use it to have a backup of the books I have and to tweak settings in the files.

Amazon tried to artificially drop their ebooks below a certain price that undercut the paperbacks. The publishers and the authors hated it, because it cuts into the money that gets back to them from the sales. It was also judged bad practice for competition reasons. Until there's a new system for ebook contracts and payments being used by the major publishers they're going to want to keep them priced like physical books.

The cheap ones are usually self published (no-one taking a cut) or specialist publishers with an ebook specific business model.

Paper and printing costs are not the largest portion of the cost of paper books.

What Murrin said. Traditional publishers have costs for warehouse space, pricey Manhattan office space, employee costs, and so on.

There are a lot of interesting discussions going on right now about the future of traditional publishers and agents in the Brave New World of self-publishing. An author can spend a year or two finding an agent, then the agent can spend another year or two finding a publisher for the author's manuscript -- and the author will still earn only about 50 cents on each $8 paperback. Or the author can take the same manuscript, pay somebody to edit it and do the cover art (or sweet-talk a talented friend or two), and put it up at the Kindle Store him/herself for $2.99 -- and earn $2.09 per e-book sold. If a mid-list (a.k.a. not already bestselling or otherwise famous) author is going to have to do his/her own marketing anyway -- and he/she will, in the current climate -- then what's the advantage to publishing your book the traditional way?

(Pssst, Ananda -- I happen to know that you can get a pretty good fantasy novel called SwanSong from iBooks for $2.99. /shameless self-promotion)

aliantha wrote: (Pssst, Ananda -- I happen to know that you can get a pretty good fantasy novel called SwanSong from iBooks for $2.99. /shameless self-promotion)

I'll check for it. Although, the ibook store doesn't work in sweden.

Ananda wrote:

aliantha wrote: (Pssst, Ananda -- I happen to know that you can get a pretty good fantasy novel called SwanSong from iBooks for $2.99. /shameless self-promotion)

I'll check for it. Although, the ibook store doesn't work in sweden.

That sucks. It's also available at smashwords.com in an iPad-friendly format, if that helps. Do you have to buy from Swedish companies?

aliantha wrote:

Ananda wrote:

aliantha wrote: (Pssst, Ananda -- I happen to know that you can get a pretty good fantasy novel called SwanSong from iBooks for $2.99. /shameless self-promotion)

I'll check for it. Although, the ibook store doesn't work in sweden.

That sucks. It's also available at smashwords.com in an iPad-friendly format, if that helps. Do you have to buy from Swedish companies?

Well, I always buy swedish products when I can. But, I don't remember why the husband said ibooks store is not allowed here. I can snoop on thesite you mentioned. Better asmall site than amazon!

Yay! Good luck!

Ananda, you can always use an ISP hider (like HotSpot Shield). They are incredibly annoying, but useful occasionally; for example banks don't allow Nigeria to access secure pages (wonder why? ) so we have to use an ISP hider to do online banking.

And check out my e-book on Smashwords. One is $0.99 and one is free (the 99 cent one is better). *shameless self promotion*

i have a kindle. and i'm reading lee child's jack reacher series right now. there are 16 books in the series and every single one of them is 9.99. grrrr.
that means i've spent basically 160.00 bucks on my kindle in the last 2 weeks. grrr again. the $$ rack up before you are aware of it.

Just another reason to stick to paper.

--A

You are just anti e-book.

Personally, I think both e-books and old-fashioned paper books have their place.

Yes, but unfortunately the place for e-books can't be your bookshelf.

--A

It's not supposed to be!

How the heck are you meant to pretend to be intellectual if you can't put all your books up on display?

I still like a paper book better. We looked into Kindle because the cost of transporting stuff overseas is basically $5/pound, which adds up too fast for books. And books are a sparse commodity here. A few used bestsellers for $10 and up, and a good collection of Christian books (they are subsidized to be affordable by a ministry called Oasis) but nothing off the beaten path (ie, no SRD!!). But the cost of the e-books is prohibitive too. So we expatriates keep passing the ones we have around.

Murrin wrote:How the heck are you meant to pretend to be intellectual if you can't put all your books up on display?

In our case, it's gotten beyond our ability to display them neatly.

Murrin wrote:How the heck are you meant to pretend to be intellectual if you can't put all your books up on display?

You just project your ipad to the TV and have the photoshow of your book covers going while forcing your guests to sit at the sofa. And then you casually interrupt them when a new cover displays and say, 'oh, that was a good book that I read... with my eyes' and so forth. It is very impressive.

MsMary wrote:

Murrin wrote:How the heck are you meant to pretend to be intellectual if you can't put all your books up on display?

In our case, it's gotten beyond our ability to display them neatly.

Yeah. I used to have the same dream as DotD: a house with a library that has floor-to-ceiling bookcases on three sides (the 4th side would be windows, for lots of natural light), a comfy easy chair or two, a simple Queen Anne-style writing desk for taking notes, etc.

But then I got tired of paying to have all those books moved every couple of years, so I got rid of nearly all of them. Now I'm down to two folding bookshelves worth. Well, three. Maybe four. And the knitting books. And the reference books by my desk. *And* the Reader.