Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

i'd go for the cheapest Kobo (the Mini, £29 in whsmith, widely available here in the uk) over the cheapest Nook (Simple Touch, £29 but usually out of stock everywhere, although some places have the backlit version for £49). it's just a nicer device, imo. it's a 5" screen rather than a 6" screen but also has narrower bevels so it's virtually pocketsize and much easier to hold.

also, epubs are avaliable in many more places than just B&N or Kobo. they use standardised DRM, Adobe Direct Editions, and so places like supermarkets etc can sell epubs that'll work. http://www.sainsburysebooks.co.uk/ for instance. in fact they don't do kindle versions of books because, i think, kindle drm is proprietary. - http://www.sainsburysebooks.co.uk/help/how-to-read/select-account?device=kindle

(not that i've ever bought a drm-protected ebook... i use my kobo exclusively for stuff from gutenberg etc)

that said, a quick look on the internet suggests that kobo is the ereader underdog in the US, only available in independent bookshops, not chains or highstreet stores. and that the mini isn't widely available at all.

ah yeah Kobo, keep mixing them up with Nook in my head. just want e-ink and pdfs really, so thanks everybody for your thoughts

when will Amazon provide kindle ebook links with every paper copy they sell (like they do for vinyl) or is this just a pipedream?

hahahaha

no

xpost they already do this for some of them. google "matchbook"

Matchbook isn't really the same thing... let's you buy kindle versions of your previous purchases at a discount, not free. Also seems to be only USA.

they're not free in some cases? ah, sorry

And pretty slim pickings last time I checked.

a couple of my matchbook titles were free, the rest priced between $0.99-2.99... not bad. I claimed the free ones, and bought three or four of the $2.99 ones. chiefly the ones that are too heavy to carry around in paper form.

Were these textbooks or something?

nah, stuff like religion and the decline of magic or neal stephenson novels that are around 1000 pages... even the paperback versions weigh a ton.

i've not heard anybody explain yet why they don't do this. would be v handy.

Interesting. I have exactly two: one a true crime book I bought in 2003 and one this big five volume music history book that was bought as a gift. I already have the first two volumes on Kindle but it is still a deal, I guess. Can't go the other way and gift the ebook, though.

Think I bought lots of physical books that I didn't get in a brick and mortar from BN online way back when.

One of my matchbook-eligible purchases was from 2008, so I assume agreements from various publishers is what is preventing more titles from being part of this?

So one would assume.

i've not heard anybody explain yet why they don't do this. would be v handy.

I like the name Matchbook, that's a good one

Bet whoever came up with it felt pleased w themselves

i didn't specifically mean the matchbooks, but in general. haven't heard anything from publishers as to why they don't like it. it would cost them literally nothing to produce (as there is no physical product). maybe i have been looking in the wrong places...

It's price protection, I would expect. Talk to a publishing person and they will tell you that very little of the marginal cost of a hardcover book is ink and paper. The whole Big 5 antitrust case was based around the houses' desire to keep the ASP of an ebook close to that of a paperback, and avoid developing consumer expectations of ridiculously cheap ebooks.

but why is this not the case with music - a CD must cost about the same price as a book to make and is sold at about the same price

the same price - popular fiction, maybe, more or less everything else = no

new popular author in hardback still generally more expensive than new band's CD, even

OK yeah I guess - let's say same price as new vinyl then.
Anyway the point is, I don't see why there's so much reluctance to bundle paper and digital versions since from Amazon's pov it would further entice people to go digital and lock into the kindle ecosystem. From the publisher's pov, I don't know - are they expecting people to buy pay twice for difefrent formats? or are they worried about piracy?

this (which is about the cost of ebooks in general) http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2011/aug/04/price-publishing-ebooks suggests $3.50 or £3 to produce a hardback.

quoting:
"But if, says Levine, the real value of a book resides in the "text itself", then the delivery method shouldn't much matter. The fixed costs – acquiring, editing, marketing – remain unchanged."

this i also agree to. but a SECOND copy of the "text itself" in a different format, sold as a package, and one that can produced for virtually free, i don't see that damaging the perceived value of a hardback, in fact it adds to it.

it damages the perceived value of the ebook.

not really (to me). if bundled ebooks add perceived value (even at no added cost) this must mean they have value themselves.

do ebook prices change when the paperback comes out?

It adds another copy to circulation though, so it's a potential lost sale - as in you can buy the book, keep the ebook for yourself and give the "free" book as a present.

I agree it would be nice to get free ebooks but I can see why publishers wouldn't think so.

sure but, again, why is this not an issue when bundling mp3 codes with vinyls or "autorips" from Amazon?

or with library copies

also

I agree it would be nice to get free ebooks but I can see why publishers wouldn't think so.

I wouldn't consider a bundled ebook version to be "free" if I paid for the actual paper copy. This might not be the case from a legal point of view, but I'd consider myself entitled to duplicates in any shape or form (eg self-made scans or mp3s of me reading the thing out). Again I'm sure lawyers would tell me that this is not legally correct.

I guess someone could conceivably do on purpose what I did by accident, give the physical book as a gift and get the the ebook for themselves.

Some publishers have started doing it - I bought some real paper books straight from Verso and got digital copies of one of them (but not the others – rights issues? they haven't sorted out digital editions? idk).

I can sort of see a tangle of reasons it isn't more widespread - maybe rights issues, vague piracy anxiety, fear of giving Amazon more of the infrastructure if ppl want a .mobi, feels like giving away an extra sale in a very squeezed industry. Maybe that's enough? I was thinking there's some deeper protective attachment to/anxiety over the idea of the specialness of the book, but actually, I can see that if I went to the marketing dept or whoever, and said 'Hey look, new 1000-page Hilary Mantel (or whoever) hardback, no-one is carrying that on the tube - let's do a non-discounted edition with ebook codes (yes, marketing ppl, maybe they have to sign in to a special aren't-books-nice website that we run to get them)' then the piracy/legal faff/reader ecosystems/giving-stuff-away arguments might still be enough to kill it.

& actually might epub v mobi v whatever get you into a tangle with Amazon mucking you around over stocking the print edition? I suppose you just print another without codes. But that's a complication.

I bought a monograph by a small local publisher in Toronto last year that mentioned a free ebook copy in the indicia, and posted the paper book home to myself & read the ebook on the road

Bezos has just raked in a bit more blood money. Yesterday, after years of flirting with the idea, I ordered a Kindle for $49. Even with the existence of Calibre, it just seems ugly that it won't support ePub, but all the ereaders have similar proprietary ego problems, so it's all a matter of pick your poison.

epub is more of an open standard (being just zipped html and some xml config files). there's optional drm on top of that but there's no way around that being closed source and at least there seems to be one provider (adobe) which is cross platform. all this, and amazon drm, has been cracked anyway.

in other news, local whsmith no longer does kobo minis, nor website, nor kobo.com. they've only had white for a while now so guess stock is finally gone. cheapest option is now the touch at £60 or the glo at £90.

If Kobo ever do a glow with page-turning buttons, I'll probably switch over... they get pretty solid reviews.

got my $44 paperwhite in the post yesterday; super light but not quite as much lighter feeling than the iPad mini I bought last weekend as I'd expected. and e-ink is weird, looks like an etch-a-sketch. but I wanted it because it'll work well in heavy sunlight, and for my kids, so I'm happy.

i am p sore about being excluded from that promotion

Bundling digital books with physical ones would have tax implications in the UK, as the VAT on printed books is 0%, whereas ebooks are the standard 20%. For no good reason as far as I'm aware.

i am p soure about being excluded from that promotion

New, non-promotion price paperwhite is still indexing. What's up with that?

Just deleting unindexed stuff and then will load up again incrementally. Seems to help it get unstuck.

Welcome aimless

it just seems ugly that it won't support ePub

part of that might -- *might* -- be technical. i might get this wrong in part, but epub is based on html and css, and those hardware, non-tablet kindles are garbage at rendering webpages, or at least they used to be, i think. maybe they could beef up that capability, and maybe part of this does have to do with business reasons, but i think there could be another side to it too.

and the thing that would lend some credence to your argument is the fact that the kindle app for ipad will not let you read epub, while ibooks will, even though the former's format of choice is some modification of .mobi and the others is a modification of .epub. that being said, i don't think ibooks supports .mobi either. heh.

your best bet is just to get an ipad, which can support basically whatever you need it to support due to the fact that it has a robust app ecosystem.